LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



^w — ^opiB^ ^'j' 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



THE FIRST 



WORDS FROM GOD 

OR 

TRUTHS MADE KNOWN IN THE FIRST 

.TWO CHAPTERS OF HIS 

HOLY WORD 

ALSO 

THE HARMONIZING OF THE RECORDS OF 
THE RESURRECTION MORNING 




FRANCIS W. UPHAM, LL.D. 

n 

Author of ''"' The Church and Science^'' ^''The Wise Men^'' ^''The Star 

of Our Lord^'' '' Thoughts on the Gospels^'' and 

''St. Matthew's Witness''' 



NEW YORK: HUNT & EATON 

CINCINNATI : CRANSTON & CURTS 

1894 



I JUl 26 1894 



K. 






Copyright, 1894, by 
FRANCIS W. UPHAM 

New York. 









TO THE MEMORY 

OF 
MY DEAR FRIEND AND CLASSMATE, 

FORDYCE BARKER, M.D., 

A PHYSICIAN HONORED IN BOTH HEMISPHERES. 

HE DID FOR THIS BOOK 

WHAT NOW IS A PLEASING REMEMBRANCE TO ITS WRITER ; 

WHO, 

LIKE ALL THE MANY AT HOME OR ABROAD 

WHO KNEW THAT WISE MAN, 

ADMIRED HIS SCIENTIFIC INTELLECT, 

AND LOVED HIM 

FOR THE RARE NOBILITY OF HIS HEART. 



Quis desiderio sit j>udor aut modus 
Tarn, cari capitis, 



THE 

FIRST WORDS FROM GOD. 



CHAPTER I. 



We find ourselves borne along on the flowing 
river of Time and the ever-coming thought is, 
whither ? Only by tracing the stream upward 
can we divine its course in the future ; and we 
trace it farther and farther up witli the assurance 
that the whither can be known only in the 
whence^ the mystery of the stream be clear only 
at the fountain. Out of all the Past comes the 
Present ; and in nature, in life, in history, tlie 
soul wisely tries to begin with the beginning. 
Wherefore, Cosmologic Thought — thought as to 
how things came to be, what things really are, 
and what they are to be — is the rule and the 
sum of much of all the world's thinking. 

Ancient Cosmologic Thought was from tradi- 
tions, from intuitions and far-sweeping analogies. 
That was the style of thinking in the time of 
the ancient nations, and thence onward to the 
end of the Middle Ages. After that epoch 



6 The First Words From God. 

another style of thought prevailed ; and attempts 
were made to solve the problem of the universe 
in a different way. The old style was the de- 
ductive. It proceeded from intuitive ideas to 
facts, relying upon analogies, and guided by tra- 
ditions. The later style is the inductive. It 
rather discredits intuitions, inclines to base its 
conclusions on observation, makes less use of 
analogy, and none of tradition. 

Modern Science, which has taken much the 
place of Ancient Cosmologic Thought, proceeds 
with toilsome steps, scrutinizing, w^eighing, 
measuring, testing everything. Its onward 
movement is cautious. It has its own great 
honors and rewards. Yet men of the earliest 
ages, by their finding out of mechanical powers, 
of the working of the metals, by the invention 
of musical instruments, the building of ships, 
the art of writing, equaled the discoveries made 
by the science of modern days. And ancient 
sages anticipated conceptions, glimpses of whose 
grandeur in the far distance now begin to kindle 
the scientific imagination — as the sight of the 
Pyramids in the distance stirs the soul of the 
builder from Berlin or London journeying up the 
current of the Nile. 



The First Words From God. 7 

Analogy is a means of discovery. With its 
aid man tries to traverse the field of the universe. 
The ancients used it boldlv. And the far- 
sweeping grandeur of ancient, oriental, analogical 
reasoning is in fine accord with all the little that 
can now be known of ancient, oriental history. It 
is in harmony with the undaunted emulation, the 
executive energy which built the aspiring tower 
of Babel, the gates of l^ineveh and Babylon, 
obelisks, temples, pyramids along the Nile. And 
the monuments of ancient labor the ancient mon- 
uments of Thought, alike imperishable, will last 
until " the great globe itself shall be dissolved." 

With the swiftness of electric fire Ancient 
Thought sped from the center to the circumfer- 
ence of things. Modern Thought begins at each 
inch of the circumference of the globe and 
thence would trace every toilsome line to where 
they all meet in the center. Those lines are now 
beginning to run into the great lines of nature's 
earliest pointing out. Science is now tending 
toward the ancient conception of one substance 
and one force. As yet this is only a tendency."^ 

* All the leading ideas in this essay were thought out thirty- 
two years ago, (1862,) and were then written out word for word 
as printed now. Some more recent thoughts are given in 
Chapters xiv-xx. 



8 The First Words From God. 

But when Modern Thought has completed its 
survey of the world — though rich its own dis- 
coveries and rewards — it will be its crowning 
glory to find itself at the height of its achieve- 
ments standing face to face with ancient thoughts 
of the East born of primeval Revelation. 

By traditions, intuitions, ideas, and analogies 
the Sages of old tried to fill a void now sought 
to be filled by botanic, ornithologic, zoologic, 
anthropologic, philologic, chemic, geologic, and 
astronomic observations. Thus something is 
known and much is unknown. The many ob- 
servations result as the few. Both methods 
should be united ; and what the combined wis- 
dom of both would still forever lack must be 
supplied by the first words from God, their 
Lawgiver. 



The First Words From God. 



CHAPTER II. 

Had the name of that man been given to 
whom were said those words of God which tell 
of His making of the universe, of this world, and 
of the human race, it would have taken away 
from the universality of the impression those 
words now make ; and, as much as any other 
Yoice from on High, that Yoice was for all. 
Who that man was, we are not told ; yet there is 
some reason for thinking that the first Yoice 
from on High came to the first man of the true 
human race. In the days of his innocence the 
Adam talked with God as a man talks with his 
friend ; and can there be a doubt that he wished 
to know of those things, or that he had the 
means of knowing? It agrees with what is so 
probable that the first and second chapters of the 
Bible are put before the lives of the Patriarchs, 
before what an eyewitness told of the Flood, 
and before the history of the Antediluvian 
World. 

Adam lived for nine hundred and thirty years. 
What he told of words of God, no doubt faith- 



10 The First Words From God. 

fully preserved ^ by pious men like Enoch, 
came with Noah across the Flood. Before the 
calling forth of new languages and the disper- 
sion from Babel of apostate, heretical nations 
the Eevelation which stands at the head of all 
revelation, was commonly known ; for signs of 
its presence in Cosmologic Ideas, widely spread 
abroad among those widely-separated nations, 
prove it was a fount of their Cosmologic think- 
ing, the spark of its conflagration. Wherefore^ 
ancient thought can be made to throw light upon 
those divine words with which the Bible begins. 
On the other hand, Modern Thought stands 
right in the way of our understanding those 
words. In the chemistry of our own day the 
idea of sixty or more elementary substances is an 
accepted idea. TJierefore — as proved hereafter 
— our science does not hold one of the keys to 
the world's formation, and it bars the way of the 

* Sir J. W. Dawson says : '•Written history in Egypt reaches 
back to 3,000 years before Christ; and if we are to take the 
written records of the Chaldean and Hebrew peoples as history, 
this extends back to the Deluge at least." If so, then, why 
may not writing have been known before the Flood ? The sud- 
den, immediate emergency of civilization after that epoch is 
evidence of the high civilization before it, spoken of by our 
Lord in Matthew xxiv, 37-39; and both together are to be 
taken as evidence that the Antediluvians, who knew so much 
else, may have known the art of writing. Why not ? is here an 
unanswerable question. 



The First Wokds From God. 11 

true interpretation of the Revelation thereof. 
The modern idea of the instantaneous creation 
of our world — or, of what practically comes to 
much the same thing, of a creation in just one 
hundred and forty-four hours, (until of late so 
commonly received and whose force is far from 
having entirely passed away,) is a fartlier bar- 
rier. And these facts should be taken with us, 
for the earlier part of this discussion is some- 
what of a comparison of ancient and modern 
conceptions of Cosmologic truth. 



12 The Fiest Woeds Fkom God. 



OHAPTEE III. 

One great idea, which our Baconian science 
now makes almost inconceivable by minds 
wholly under its control, was anciently a very 
common idea, namely, that matter in all its 
many and varied forms and appearances is every- 
where and always essentially one and the same 
substance or essence ; or, to state it in one word, 
(though a clumsy one,) the idea of the homoge- 
neity of matter. In India this idea was in the 
prevailing dogma that matter is spirit. In the 
more atheistic philosophy of India mind was a 
property of matter. In the one all was spirit, in 
the other all was matter ; and thus in each there 
was the idea of only one essence or substance. 

The idea of the homogeneity or essential 
sameness of all substances acted upon the early 
brain like the hasheesh. Few ideas have had so 
widespread, long-continued, and divers effects. 
It underlies the w^eird transformations, the dis- 
solving views of Eastern fable, the phantasy of 
metamorphoses and of transmigrations of souls. 
It had magical power to call forth the strange 



The First Words From God. 13 

yet often persuasive pictures of the old mytholo- 
gies, flowering out in myth and legend, shaping 
poetry and philosophy, science and civilization. 
To its continuing presence the Dark and the 
Middle Ages owed much of their legendary 
credulity, of their richness of fancy, and some- 
thing of their stability of faith. Its out-workings, 
traceable in all the science of those ages, are 
plainly to be seen in Alchemy which '' labored 
in its light and journeyed in its hope." 

M. Eenouard's " History of Medicine " (from 
which I quote at length) is constructed on a 
principle which should charm a metaphysician, 
namely, that all medical theories are derived, more 
or less directly, from some system of philosophy. 
He traces the history of the Art of Medicine, 
from its first recorded beginnings to the close of 
the Middle Ages, mainly through the influence 
of the Idea of the homogeneity or essential 
sameness of matter. He shows the potency and 
continuance of that idea in a sphere where we 
should hardly look for it, as the healing art so 
much depends on observation and experiment. 
But, in ancient days, the art of medicine largely 
partook of some of the characteristics of ancient 
philosophic thinking. M. Eenouard says the 



14 The First Words From God. 

theories of the oldest of his very old fraternity 
were acompend of much of ancient speculation 
— '^ the science of medicine in general was made 
up of long dissertations on the principle of 
life, the elements of the body, the primary 
cause of generation, and a crowd of other mys- 
teries equally impenetrable." 

Pythagoras held to the idea of the homo- 
geneity of matter. " He derived it from Chal- 
deans and priests of Egypt." This ascription to 
the idea of an Eastern origin in Greece should 
be noted ; but, as hereafter proved, it was nearer 
at hand. M. Eenouard states that Empedocles 
of Agrigentum conceived that amorphous mat- 
ter had received from the supreme intelligence 
Jvur elementary modes of existerice^ which, vari- 
ously combined, constituted all bodies in nature. 
On this M. Renouard's acute remarks are sug- 
gestive : " It served to explain the infinite di- 
versity of bodies without destroying the dogma 
of the homogeneity of matter;" and he adds, 
"The chemists themselves are not far from re- 
turning to that dogma by their theory of equiv- 
alents." 

Hippocrates, the great physician, made that 
hypothesis the basis of his medical theory. 



The First Words From God. 15 

Some of liis school held to two elements. In 
one Hippocratic treatise, " water is the passive 
principle/' and the fire element " is the source 
of all motion ; in the human body the central 
heat exerts an influence in an unseen, intangible, 
noiseless manner. In it resides the soul, intelli- 
gence, prudence, augmentation, motion, diminu- 
tion, sleep, and wakefulness." In another Hip- 
pocratic treatise, '^ On Fleshes, or The Origin 
of Man " — earth is " the passive element. It 
receives by the action of the fire element or its 
admixture with it all the apparent forms of 
bodies." In that treatise the fire element is 
said " to be endowed with wisdom and to see 
and to know all things in the past and in the 
future." 

In our final citation, M. Eenouard shows sim- 
ilar thinking in the remote East. In a Chinese 
medical work ascribed to Hoam-Ti, the Third 
Emperor of the First Dynasty, (B. C. 2687,) a 
collection of fragments still of authority, " Two 
radical hidden principles are set forth, Heat and 
Moisture. They give to all things life and mo- 
tion. Heat is in perpetual agitation by diffu- 
sion, expansion, rarefaction, and penetration." 



16 The Fibst Wokds From God. 



CHAPTEE IV. 

Whence came the early and widespread idea 
of the oneness of all substance ? — so widespread 
that it is fairly to be presumed to have prevailed 
almost everywhere among the ancient nations. 
In answering this question I recall the idea that 
the ancient mind was in a better position than 
the modern mind to seize hold of Cosmologic 
truth. Our school knowledge of chemistry wdth 
its several elementary substances hinders our 
doing justice to the ancient idea of the homo- 
geneity of matter. Within the Baconian cycle 
of thought the idea is a difficult one, but it came 
easily in the great cycle of Cosmologic thinking 
which closed with the Middle Ages, To the 
ancient mind, free from the precision of chem- 
ical analysis and from the dogma of some sixty 
substances, nature plainly and irresistibly sug- 
gested that matter in all of its many forms and 
appearances is essentially of one and the same 
substance. For in nature all is change and all 
change is interchange. Food — a growth from 
all the elements — food, solid or liquid, animal or 



The First Words From God. 17 

vegetable, changes into blood, flesh, muscle, 
bone. From out of the ground a shrub grows 
that takes from earth, water, air, and light that 
which becomes wood, bark, leaves, blossoms, 
fruit. Gross darkened air and light are lib- 
erated from burning wood, and the residuum is 
ashes. Mist changes into rain and ice ; ice into 
water and mist. How could those endlessly 
diversified transformations of things, often re- 
turning into their original forms, but suggest to 
the unfettered minds of old that in nature there 
was something which could not be transformed ? 
— that all the ceaseless changing was the Pro- 
tean playing of one essence? The unfettered 
soul could not but welcome an idea so in har- 
mony with its own nature. For the soul, with its 
manifold intellections, diversified, ever-changing 
affections, its ceaseless volitions, is one soul; and 
the body, " with its many members, is one body." 
It was easy to pass from the one substance or 
essence to its four great manifestations. And 
Earth, Water, Air, and Fire still keep the names 
of the four elements. But gross injustice is 
done to ancient philosophers as to their idea of 
them. For with them the four elements stood 

for a great deal more than they stand for with 
2 



18 The First Words From God. 

us. Earth was their term for solids, Water for 
fluids. Air for gases, and Fire was the sign not 
of heat and light only, but of occult qualities, of 
which their ineffective efforts to pierce into, or 
to conceive of, were premonitions of the hidden 
potencies that now are known to link together 
heat, light, electricity, galvanism, magnetism, and 
other forces as different ajppearings of one force. 
Some few of the ancient philosophers did try 
to reduce the four elements to two, and even to 
one — as Thales to water — but the Fire element 
could hardly be dispensed witli. There must be 
some pervasive, formative, assimulative element. 
Obviously, this was the Fire element: — hi its 
third verse^ and elsewhere in the Bihle^ having 
the name of Light. For that element is more 
Protean than Earth or Water or Air. Piercing 
into all things it takes their nature. This hot- 
test of all things is cold in ice. The softest of 
all things, it is hard in steel. The most uneasy of 
all things, it is quiet in flint. Of the four ele- 
ments it is the one that most readily transforms 
things. The seeming doing of this by the other 
elements is often traceable to this element. And 
so in the " Rig Vedas " it is not surprising to 
find, that "Agni — fire, is all the divinities." 



The First Wokds From God. 19 



CHAPTER Y. 

I PASS on to another Ancient Cosmologic Idea, 
namely, that the World is a living thing. So 
common among the ancients was the idea of 
the soul of the world as to be suflScient proof of 
their belief in the life of the world. And, 
while most, if not all, of the ancient philosophers 
held that matter was eternal, yet in spite of this 
it was their belief that the world was generated 
and lived. 

Men who believed in the essential sameness 
of all material substances, if they were men of 
a philosophic turn or men who thought at all, 
could not have mistaken or have underrated tlie 
thauraaturgic work of the igneous element in 
generation, and especially in what they so often 
witnessed in the household egg. In spite of 
rare and doubtful exceptions, Omne vivuni ex 
ovo is still a scientific formula ; yet in the well- 
known egg there is only an inodorous, tasteless 
fluid, colorless in part ; and in no form of the 
ovarian fluid can science detect anything which 
gives any promise of the life which may come 



20 The First Wokds From God. 

out of it. The subtle thinkers of old could not 
have taken that fluid for the primitive, amor- 
phous, unmixed, uncompounded, invisible thing 
of which all visible things were compacted and 
7nade^ but that it called it to mind is shown 
in ancient mythologies by the Great Creative 

Egg. 

It mattered not whether it were the heat of 
the mother bird, of an alien bird, or from a fire- 
heated oven. The heat imparted motion to the 
particles, as it does to those of water when a fire 
is kindled under a caldron. It formed and 
arranged the soft and the hard parts of the new 
cosmos till at last there came out a chicken, a 
dove, an eagle, or a crocodile. The flow of heat 
running unbroken through all the generative 
processes made each of their several stages, and 
it made one stage of them all. Appearances, 
similar to those so familiar in the household 
egg, repeated themselves in all generation. The 
seed of a plant appears to be homogeneous, solid 
matter, and heat is as indispensable to the quick- 
ening and growth of a plant as of an animal. 
To ancient thinkers such facts proved that heat 
and generation, as a process, were related as 
cause and effect; that with the Fire element 



The Fikst Wokds From God. 21 

everything, and without it nothing, is gener- 
ated. 

The old Idea of a man as a Microcosm, or little 
World, illustrates and confirms all this. There 
are traces of that idea in old Chinese fragments. 
It was inwrought into the common talk of many 
ancient lands. To us it has come down as a 
vague reminiscence of a saying whose old 
meaning has long been forgotten. It is now a 
conceit, a poetic fantasy, a pretty saying. To 
the ancients it was grave, indisputable fact ; and 
thus was proved. Man lived and the World 
lived. Earth, water, and air were obvious con- 
stituents of the world, and the presence of the 
Fire element was involved in the facts that the 
World had life and that life and heat were 
never separate. Other facts also proved it. In 
the soil where a plant is generated from its seed 
there nmst be heat — one form of the element^ 
Fire or Light^ or call it what you will — and to 
the indwelling of that element in the earth those 
sages attributed, in jDart, the heat in the ground, 
as anyone must whose mind is not fettered by 
those scientific dogmas, of which Goethe said, 
" They make science impossible." They drank of 
hot waters welling from the ground. They 



22 The First Words From God. 

knew of the pliosphorescence of the sea. Their 
eyes were dazzled by the light outflashing from 
airborn clouds. They saw or heard of volcanoes 
where the earth exhaled deep-drawn breaths of 
fire. There are no fire-emitting mountains in 
Syria, yet Hebrew poets often allude to such — 
as when it is written^ " God touches the moun- 
tains, and they smoke." And so for ancient 
sages there were signs of the Fire element in all 
the world. 

With equal ease and certainty they found the 
four elements in man. The w^ater he drank was 
transformed in his blood. Air he inhaled. His 
body, decayed, was earth. His vital heat was the 
sign of the abiding in him of the Fire element. 
It was present in the growth of the embryo and 
in the Seven Ages. It was in man's earliest and 
last breathing — the Alpha and Omega of his 
life. And thus to those sages, with their readi- 
ness and boldness in the use of analogy and their 
little precision of evidence, a real, true likeness 
between man and the world seemed to be fully 
proved. 



The First Words From God. 23 



CHAPTER VI. 

Thus far, in making long-disused ways of 
thinking and ideas well-nigh forgotten more fa- 
miliar and in giving somewhat of their reasons, 
I have been opening the way for a willing and 
intelligent consideration of these new questions : 
Did the ancient Hebrews know and receive the 
idea of the homogeneity of matter — that is, of 
the elementary, essential sameness of all ma- 
terial substances ? And, did they also know and 
receive the idea of the generation and life of 
the Earth ? 

The former of those Ideas lived early and 
long. It flourished throughout the whole time 
and space of one old and wide and lasting cycle 
of thought, in the remote East, the far West, in 
pantheistic dreams of visionary Indian devotees 
and in golden dreams of alchemists. And, so 
far as it was the quick outgrowth of the soul's 
early natural ways of thinking, it may have been 
known to the Hebrews. 

Among the apostate nations of the Dispersion 
from Babel, that Oosmologic truth, with that of 



24 The First Words From God. 

the generation and life of tlie World, was quick- 
ened by primeval Revelation and upheld by 
reminiscences thereof. Assuredly, therefore, 
tliose great truths were known and accepted by 
the Hebrews ; for the sacred memories brought 
by Noah across the Flood, carried by Abraham 
from Clialdea to beyond Jordan, and not lost 
among his people in their sojourn in Egypt, 
were put together and authoritatively recorded 
in tlie books of their Lawgiver and Prophet. 

Before stating the proof that those Cosmologic 
truths and truths whieh complete and far tran- 
scend them are Q^evealed^ it is at once and fully 
granted that the sight of tliose truths in the Bible 
opens untraveled fields of thought. But not 
fifty years have gone since Dr. Tayler Lewis — 
owned before he died by all competent judges as 
good a Biblical critic as any in his own land or 
in any other land — was condemned and scoffed 
at by theologic professors and scholars of note as 
an infidel and fool, because it was given him of 
Qodi philologically to establish the fact that the 
use of natural agencies in the Creation is re- 
vealed in the first two chapters of Genesis ; and 
the causes which so blinded men to that truth 
may have blinded them to other truth. 



The First Words From God. 25 

It is, however, true that more than once the 
truth established by Lewis had been a thought / 
but it was much such an ineffectual thought as 
St. Augustine's of the Creative Times as not of 
the class of our days. Paley paid there was a 
" possibility of its being proved that things were 
produced with mechanical dispositions fixed be- 
forehand by intelligent appointment." And 
there is this in tlie Catholic Review^ April, 1892 : 
" It is plain, w^rites the learned Father Harper in 
his ^ Metaphysics of the Schools,' that according 
to the teaching of St. Thomas and of the Fathers 
of the Church, the primordial elements alone 
were created in the strict sense of the term, and 
that the rest of nature was developed out of 
these according to a fixed order of natural 
operation, under the supreme guidance of the 
Divine administration." Yet to Tayler Lewis it 
was given of God to establisli that truth and fact 
philologically ; and this he did by unflinching, 
intelligent, and close adherence to the gram- 
matical construction and the full meaning and 
force of the sacred words in the first chapter of 
Genesis. 



26 The First Words From God. 



CHAPTER yil. 

Somewhat disconnected, general Thoughts 
may open the way for Scriptural proof of the 
Cosniological truths before stated ; and for com- 
ments on some things told of Creation. 

I. Too often the Bible is looked upon as con- 
sisting of moral precepts, of a set of rules for 
the guidance of life ; when looked into deeper 
little else than the Eternal Decrees is often seen. 
Tliose things are there, and yet they are not the 
Bible. The Bible is the unveiling of the lovely, 
lovable characteristics of God. The beauty of 
His glory may also be seen in His works, as the 
opening chapters of the Bible witness. And so, 
too, in history. For by tlie history of Isi*ael, 
the Bible, making known God's dealing with all 
nations, reveals that while " clouds and darkness 
are round about Him, righteousness and judg- 
ment are the habitations of His throne." 

II. The First Words from God reveal the 
union in the Creator of the universe of Infinity 
and Personality — the latter word, when ap- 
plied to Him, carrying with it no thought of 



The FmsT Words From God. 27 

limitation, signifying that God as really and truly 
feels, as man feels. That stands out in His 
thoughtful care for His creatures. Tliis gives 
immeasurable value to human life ; and it quick- 
ens faith with love, when, throughout, the Bible 
reveals in many ways the wish and will of our 
Almighty, Eternal, Infinite, Creator to make 
himself known as " our Father in heaven." 

TIT. The First Words from God tell that He 
is free to create or not to create. They set at 
naught atheism, polytheism, materialism, ftital- 
ism, asceticism, and all unbelief. And their im- 
pressive manifestation of what is deepest and 
highest in His being should bring home to the 
heart the truth, of which all later Revelation is 
full, tliat God is the All-loving. To see this^ to 
meditate on it, to feel it deeply is rightly to ap- 
prehend the first words from on High. Yet that 
this great truth and fact is the great end and 
aim of this revelation is not often seen. Its 
more evident purj^ose stands in the way, so fix- 
ing thought upon it that tlie true glory of the 
earliest Reflation is almost unthpught of. For 
it is 'not the greatest end and aim of the First 
Words from God to mahe Tcnown his wovTcs in 
Creation^ that is only the means to its higher^ 



28 The First Words From God. 

spiritual^ religious end and aim^ which is the 
revealing of God Himself to man. 

lY, Yet, if we try in one wide sweep of vi- 
sion to see all tlie forms of idolatry, reaching in 
their ever-changing folly and sin, from the sun 
and the moon to beasts and creeping things, then 
we may apprehend the merciful forethought of 
our Creator in so fully revealing that He made 
each and every thing that has been an object of 
idolatrous worshipr 

The mind of the early Christians, hemmed in- 
on every side by idolaters, was fixed on that 
truth in both their defensive and offensive war ; 
and that mood of thinking lasted nntil the 
Church, somewhat to its perplexity, was im- 
pelled by science to search into the scientific 
truth on the first of Genesis ; Providence leading 
it in to see, in that revelation, not only spiritual 
but scientific teaching which proves it a word 
from God. 

Y. Yet the soul worth of the scientific truth 
in the first chapters of the Bible is as nothing to 
that of their spiritual truths and facts. For they 
tell that when Satan tempted Eve and Adam, 
and God punished their sin, then by the promise 
of One of woman born who would destroy the 



The Fikst Words From God. 29 

devil and his works, (a promise whicli foretold 
the nature and suffering of Christ Jesus,) the 
heart of God as a merciful Father, willing at any 
cost to save from the death of sin, is so revealed 
that in the opening of the Bible there is the 
truth and fact, whose unfolding is the whole of 
the Bible from Genesis to Revelation, giving it 
a unity beyond the capacity of the human mind 
to have conceived of, a Unity which proves the 
Bible is the Word of God. 



30 The Fikst Words From God. 



CHAPTEE VIII. 

YI. That "God created the Heaven and 
the Eartli " is equivalent to saying He made the 
universe — a word not found in the Hebrew lan- 
guage. But in some places in the chapter hara^ 
created^ must be rendered made ; and that, in and 
of itself, it has, in its first vei-se, the force of 
making out of nothing^ is now given up. Yet, 
as hereafter seen, the first verse implies and the 
second verse teaches, what that strange formula 
really means. 

YII. They who try to believe that the beauty, 
power, and truth of those First Words from on 
High, wliich open the heart of our Almighty, 
Eternal, Infinite Creator and Ruler as the heart 
of a kind Father, originated in Assyrian legends 
of many gods — the uncouth, monstrous spawn of 
uncreated matter — are moral lunatics. 

Yni. After Genesis i, 1-6, as we listen we hear 
the Yoice going on to tell of the maTcing of our 
world. It tells the order, the number of the 
great works therein. It tells of those great 



The First Words From God. 31 

works in a general way. It tells only of them. 
And could Adam have asked for a catalogue of 
everything? The spiritual, religious ends and 
aims for which the Revelation came needed only 
a selection out of the myriads of events and 
trains of events. The world could not have 
held the record of each and every thing. The 
weight of the thousands of facts would have 
broken down the human mind. Yet the Reve- 
lation covers everything."^ Its unity, its fullness, 
are of God, and so are its silences. Genius and 
fine critical insight are blended with reverence 
in the Duke of Argyll's saying : '' Its words are 
remarkable — miraculous they seem — in that 
character of reserve which leaves open to reason 
all that reason may be able to attain. The mean- 
ing of its words seems always to be ahead of 
science." 

IX. What is told of Creation is not a poem, 
as some have thought ; perhaps for the reason 
that it has all and more than all the force and 
unity of sublimest poetry. Common sense de- 



*Even the creation of angels. The mention of these in 
Chapter ii, 1, is not out of place, for in the retelling of what was 
divinely told it comes with the words, ** Thus the heavens and 
the earth were finished " when anything left out would natur- 
ally come to mind. 



32 The First Words From God. 

inands clear and strong evidence of its being 
poetry. Of such evidence there is none. 

. X. The Hke is also true of the idea of a series 
of visions seen in a trance. This favorite con- 
clusion of some good thinkers is deduced from 
the fact that elsewhere in the Bible revelations 
are often said to have been made in visions. In 
those cases that fact is stated. Here nothing of 
the kind is stated, nothing of the kind is 
intimated. Wherefore, that notion is with- 
out evidence, is against evidence. And 
the fact that in the First Words from on High 
God did not reveal Himself and His truth as He 
did to His prophets, born after the Fall of man, 
is fair confirmation of the idea that He then 
spake to Adam ; for with the Adam God talked 
as a man talks with a man, coming into tlie gar- 
den and saying, "Adam, where art thou ? " 

XI. For the most part, the words are com- 
mon words ; and in the few places where their 
meaning differs from their everyday meaning 
the context explains, fixes, and makes their 
meaning clear. Thus, when God is said to have 
named a thing, this has nothing to do with hu- 
man language, though often thought to have ; 
for this divine calling or naming was before man 



The First Words From God. 33 

was made. And it ought to be well understood^ 
that while man in naming a thing tries to de- 
scribe its quality or office, God's naming gives 
quality, office, and place. 

XII. As giving some idea of its words, of its 
structure as a whole and in all its parts, it may 
reverently be said, its style is colloquial. This 
also is to be thought of — what is told may not 
have been continuously told, but said at differ- 
ent moments ; and if the things thus told were 
retold in one continuous history, in the putting 
together of things said at different times, there 
might naturally be what skeptics have taken for 
marks and signs of records differing from each 
other, and even of different ages. 

XIII. What is told is far from being merely 

history, for its end and aim are spiritual ; yet in 

form it is historic — like all that comes after it 

in the spiritually historic book it begins. And, 

in Exodus xx, 11, and in St. Matthew xix, 4, our 

Lord treats it as history. 
3 



34 The First Words From God. 



CHAPTEE IX. 

From those general words I pass on to com- 
ments on some things told of the Earth's mak- 
ing and state, bj a paraphrase after the manner 
of a Targiim, what may be learned from the 
first and second verses of this Revelation ; 
altliough until explained, this will seem to have 
in it the error that matter is eternal and will be 
obscure when thus given in advance of its 
proof, and of needed illustration — When God 
created all that He created and made, the first 
form of that thing, whose name as a complete 
and finished thing was the Earthy was the first 
form of all that was created ; and that first ex- 
isting Thing, out of which as its first principle of 
being the unive7'se came at the word of God, 
then was formless and void and darTcness was on 
the face of its unbounded, unlimited, infinite 
vastness. 

Of that darTcness something will be said at the 
end of these inquiries. Here, we are to consider 
the words, "In the beginning." When was 
that ? Kashi and Eben Ezra, wise Rabbins of 



The First Words From God. 35 

the twelfth century, held that the phrase points 
to a timeless state. So, at a much earlier date, 
did the Targnni of Onkelos and other Targums. 
This testimony is of weight ; yet the true mean- 
ing of those words is one of the keys that unlock 
great secrets; and, in a matter of such conse- 
quence, we cannot rest entirely content with the 
fallible judgment of men. But we must give 
undoubting trust to the Voice of God when His 
opening of St. John's holy gospel assures us that 
" In the beginning " means, in eternity, I note 
this now; and later on, when again it comes 
in sight, will try to explain the fact that the 
Universe was made in eternity, before its out- 
ward, visible making began in time. Here the 
Voice instantly goes on to tell of the Making 
of the Earth. Now from these brief and gen- 
eral words I pass on to special yet condensed 
comments on some of the things told of that 
making. 

The portraiture of the Making of the Earth 
begins (as reverently we may think it would be- 
gin) with the earth's primal state of being. 
For what unhappily has been printed as its sec- 
ond verse should have been part of its first verse. 
In that second verse the word Earth names the 



36 The Fikst Words From God. 

finished thing whose making is to be told. Un- 
til that be understood, there can be no right 
interpretation of what is told of the making of 
the earth. And for the proof of these things I 
ask a close, a full, a fair hearing. 

" In the beginning God created the heaven 
and the earth ; and the earth " — was then in the 
condition about to be described ; for, as said be- 
fore, verse second belongs with the first. In 
verse second vau is rightly rendered, and. 
There it is connective and links what is about 
to be said of the first state of the earth to the 
words before. So Dr. Lewis held in " The Six 
Days of Creation." And as the grammatical 
connecting of the two verses is so important T 
subjoin his clear and decisive words, some years 
afterward, in 1865, in the April number of the 
Methodist Quarterly of that date : — " ^And the 
earth was formless and void.' The tense form 
of the Hebrew verb denotes contemporaneous- 
ness with the principium mentioned in the first 
verse. Such was its state when the creative 
work began. Had it not been the state in which 
the work commences, but a succeeding state or 
act, it would have required the van conversive 
form, according to a rule which is one of the 



The FmsT Words From God. 37 

most fixed things in the Hebrew language. It 
is certain that the great things mentioned in 
verses first and second are not successive, but 
contemporaneous and initial. They all belong 
to the heginningP 

Yet the mind of Dr. Lewis did not reach 
on to the conclusions hereinafter, in part, drawn 
from the grammar of those verses. The reason 
may appear when he says the Beginning in John 
i, 1, was older than the one in Genesis i, 1. 
Yet John i points back to Genesis i. It does in 
its first words, where there is the same omission of 
the article in the Greek that there is in the first 
words of the Hebrew, and it does so repeatedly. 
In this solitary instance Dr. Lewis is unmindful 
that Holy Scripture in one place cannot but 
accord with itself in another place. 

Dr. McCaul says " that and makes the 
second verse a continuation of the first verse. 
^And the earth was without form and void,' 
implies that the earth was in existence, and that 
something had been said of it with which the 
' and ' is the connecting link." 

Lange stumbled on the truth when he said, 
" The water of verse second is the form of the 
Earth itself in its first condition ; " yet he spoils 



38 The First Words From God. 

this by speaking of tlie Earth's first condition as 
"gaseous." Dehtzsch stumbled on the truth 
when he said, " Tohu and Bohu and the Tehom^ 
with the darkness lying over it, originated in 
the Divine call into being ; but his way of ac- 
counting for this is silly. 

Some of the Eabbins use when for vau^ and 
their paraphrase emphatically expresses their 
opinion that the prinGij[>ium of the Earth was 
in existence in the " Beginning." 

It was the makeshift of the earlier of tliose 
who tried to reconcile Scripture and geology, so 
to disjoin the first and second verses of Genesis 
that all geologic time might come between them. 
In his "Religion of Geology" Dr. Hitchcock 
held that this was possible ; quoted Pye Smith 
saying and means but ; and also the still more 
strange assertion that it means afterwards. Now 
such things are critical curiosities — yet of value 
as matters of history. 

It is a much more persistent error, that the 
second verse tells of a state of things which 
accords with the Nebular Theory. That per- 
suasive, tempting, superficial conjecture deludes 
many. Yet Genesis i, 1-6 has no reference to 
that theory whose facts are subsequent matters. 



The First Words From God. 39 

That Scripture reveals the beginning of things, 
the origin of creation ; and when its ahnost 
boundless extent, its sublime height, is appre- 
hended, it can no more be conceived that it 
would stoop to such lesser things than that Reve- 
lation would condescend to interweave with the 
great decrees, ordaining tlie plant or the ani- 
mal kingdoms, what Linnaeus tells of some 
pretty flower, or Buffon of some uncommon 
brute! 

The period spoken of in that Scripture is 
named Day One. Comments pass this by as of 
no consequence ; but no word of God is mean- 
ingless. And of that naming, the significance, 
wlien illumined by other Scripture or as it 
stands in Genesis, is of very great consequence. 
For when a Time Cycle is described as Day One, 
Day Second, Third, Fourth, and so on, the day 
first named is not of the same order as the days 
named afterwards. Its end would not be that of 
the second, of tlie third, or of any of the other 
days. Inclosing them all, it would not end 
before them ; it might not end with tliem ; but 
to write all that in full would be like writing out 
the figures of the multiplication table. 

Marking that peculiar naming, Josephus said 



40 The First Words From God. 

that at another time he would explain it, but if 
he ever kept that interesting promise some writ- 
ing of his has perished. 

The Scripture in which that naming is found 
tells of the making of all that is made ; and that 
Day is the All of Time. In that Day One the 
Eternal Word, by sending forth the element 
Light, (which is essentially present in all that is 
made, a truth and fact hereafter to be considered,) 
and the Holy Spirit, by the quickening of life, 
began the creation of the universe. And God, 
contrasting the duration of that day with His 
own Eternity, gave to this Time Cycle the name 
it has in Genesis, when He said, "Before the Day 
I am." 



The First Words From God. 41 



CHAPTER X. 

Why the name Earth is used in the second 
verse, and what it means, is plain enough in the 
calcium light of common sense ; yet scholars 
are stone-blind to the meaning there of the 
name of that whose making is about to be 
described. In their comments they mistake 
the description in the second verse of the 
primordial heing of the earthy of which the 
words " formless and void " are a part, for a pic- 
ture of chaos^ an unscriptural pagan thing, an 
atheistic thing ; for chaos there cannot be, in the 
dominions of God; or they mistake it for a 
picture of a ruined world^ a notion that has no 
shred of evidence in holy Scripture ; or they 
mistake it for a picture of ghostlike matter, a 
nebulosity such as astronomers discover in the 
fields of space, though that which is revealed 
and described in verse second was in existence 
before this world or any other part of the uni- 
verse began to be made in time. 

The principium principiorum of the earth 
was " In the beginning." Yet matter is not 



42 The First Words From God. 

eternal ; for the description of the princijpiur)i 
of the earth denies to it every property of mat- 
ter. That first Thing lias nothing outward. It 
h formless. It has nothing inward. It is void. 
No height, no depth, is predicated of it. It is a 
tehwn : — a word in the Septuagint insufficiently 
rendered by ahyss. That Greek word, giving 
only the idea of deptJi^ gives not half of the 
meaning ; for on every side a tehom is a 
boundless thing. Far better is the word trans- 
lated by the English word deep^ which answers 
to the Hebrew term. At times each is used 
for the sea, as that seems boundless. As the 
sky seems boundless the deep may be used for 
the sky — as by Hawthorne, the purity of 
whose English is justly admired, " The thun- 
der rolled distant along the deep of heaven." 
But in the second verse of Genesis it cannot 
mean the sea or the sky, for they were made 
afterwards. 

Tehom^ the deep^ suits the unlimited vastness 
of the Thing revealed, yet into its description 
comes a word rendered waters. The Hebrew 
word answers to the English word fluid. Its 
plural form indicates abundance, and here im- 
mensity. That in different places in the chap- 



The First Words From God. 43 

ter the word stands for things as unlike, and as 
wide apart as possible is plain from the context. 
It is there used for the water known to us, and 
there it is also used in the description of an un- 
created Thing which, as the second verse tells, 
was in existence in the Beginning — in Eter- 
nity. 

In the second verse the term Waters ascribes 
an unfixed, fluent quality to that infinite Thing 
of whose revelation the word is only a part ; and 
this use of that word reminds us of a strange 
phrase of some old Greek thinkers, who, in try- 
ing to conceive of the first form of matter, 
called it the fluid of nonentity. 



44 The First Words From God. 



CHAPTER XI. 

I PUT off inquiry as to what was that Thing 
existing " In the beginning," out of which all 
material things were created and made, for the 
sake of stating farther evidence of the mean- 
ing of what is told, in the second verse, of the 
first state of the earth. " In the beginning," 
" the Earth " (and again to say what has twice 
been said) whose name when a finished thing 
is there given — '' The earth was without form, 
and void ; and darkness was upon the face of the 
deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the 
face of the waters." Tohu^ Bohu^ and Waters — 
the latter a word of whose significance some- 
thing has been said — are leading words in 
this description. With almost inspired felicity 
tohu and hohu have been translated '^ formless 
and void^^^ which sufllciently agrees with their 
rendering by the LXX, though in the Greek 
language they found words better fitted than the 
choicest English to tell with clear precision of 
the ante-primeval Thing thus revealed. 

Bohu is found only thrice, and never apart 



The First Words From God. 45 

from tohu, Tohu is found some eighteen 
times. But the other uses of tohu and hohu 
are of little use in determining their meaning 
in Genesis i, for they are suggested by it, and to 
it are only remotely allied. . The eighteenth 
verse of the seventh chapter of the ancient book 
of Job is the most decisive verse as to tohu. 
There the drying-up water of a brook is said to 
go up into Tohu I the water, though still as 
really existing as ever, becoming (aoparog) invis- 
ible; and this use of tohu closely agrees with 
its rendering in Genesis by the LXX. 

St. Jerome's " inanis et vacua " is insufflcent ; 
but in the seventeenth verse of the eleventh 
chapter of the Wisdom of Solomon he ren- 
ders " amorphous hyle^'^ of which the world is 
said to be made, by invisa materia j and St. 
Augustine's invisiiilis et incomposita is close 
to the translation of tohu and hohu by the 
LXX. 

It is unaccountable that the translation of 
those words in the Greek version of Hebrew 
Scripture used by the Jews of the Dispersion, 
used by the Jews in Palestine, used by the 
Apostles, has been little considered and little 
understood ! For could there be more satis- 



46 The First Words From God. 

factory evidence of the meaning of those words 
to the Hebrews of old ? ^ The translation of 
tohu and holiu by the LXX gives the Hebraic 
idea of their meaning as it was two hundred 
years and more before the Christian Era, while 
also giving their idea in more ancient days. 
And — what is of far greater moment — its wisdom 
is established by One from whom no appeal can 
be taken ; for, in words presently to be quoted, 
our Lord Himself commissioned the utterance 
of the Truth to which the LXX bear witness in 
their rendering of toliu and holm. 

And how did the LXX render these words in 
Greek ? The LXX render tohu and hoJiu by 
unwrought and invisible. 'AKaraafcevaorog^ un- 
wrought : — uniform, shall we say ? like the uni- 
form substance of tlie marble block which the 
sculptor is to carve in relief or to fashion into a 
group? So we might think at first; but here 
comparison with any material substance utterly 
fails to do any justice to the fineness of the idea 
of the LXX. It is far too gross ; for they shut 
out any likeness to any material thing from their 
own conception of the thing revealed as '^ form- 

* There are many difficult, unsettled questions as to the 
Septuagint ; and yet the Septuagint is now used by the Greek 
Church as its translation of the Hebrew Bible. 



The First Words From God. 47 

less and void," when to the word unwrought 
they join the word doparog^ invisible. That is 
the word in Scripture for existences that in no 
way can be known by the senses. God is " the 
King eternal, immortal, doparog, invisible,^^ And 
the meaning the LXX gave tohu and iohu was 
divinely authorized when God commissioned 
the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews to say 
— " the things which are seen are not made of 
things which do a^ppear?^ 

The Wisdom of Solomon says, 'Hhat God 
made the cosmos from the amorphous hyleP 
Plato and other Greek philosophers gave, that 
name to the first existing Thing. And here an 
inquiry as to what they thought of that first 
thing will throw light upon the translation of 
hohu and tohu by the LXX. It will also show 
that ancient heathen philosophers more thought- 
fully and acutely studied the problem of primal 
being than it has been studied in the modern 
world. And here it is instructive to listen to 
Aristotle saying of one of his Cosmologic ideas, 
what no doubt he might have said of others, 
"This opinion is not only entertained by me, 
but seems to have heen a very ancient opinion^ 
and to have been held by the primitive menP 



48 The First Words From God. 

Plato conceived of the hyle as an elementary 
principle without parts or divisibility, older than, 
and in no way like, matter even in its lowest 
organized state. In the " Timseus" Plato seems 
to describe it as the material from which matter 
is made. As for the mother of everything which 
becomes an object of sight, he said, " Let us call 
it neither solid nor air, nor fluid, nor anything 
which springs from these, nor anything from 
which these are directly generated, but doparov 
€i6og TL Kai dfiopffyov — an invisible species, having 
no form of itself, yet capable of receiving all." 

Aristotle and Plato held that de nihilo nihil 
is a self-evident truth. Such it is. The dogma 
that the world was made " out of nothing " is 
good as a safeguard against the error that matter 
is eternal — the error of heathenism now lurk- 
ing in evolutionism — yet if the meaning and 
use of the w^ords "out of nothing" be not 
limited to only that^ then those words are self- 
evident nonsense. 

If from what is revealed of the making of the 
Earth we learn how the truth — de nihilo nihil — 
and the fact that matter is not eternal may exist 
together, a problem never solved before is solved, 
and for the need of that solution see Appendix V. 



The First Words From God. 49 



CHAPTER XIL 

Some conjectures of the wise of old, and 
especially Plato's wonderful divination as to the 
first existing thing, are somewhat countenanced 
by the First Words from on High ; yet neither 
Plato nor any of the heathen philosophers could 
tell what that Thing might he. What their 
thinking lacked, in the main, is supplied by 
what the first verse of His Bible makes known 
of God, and its first two verses go far beyond 
all their thinking. God created the heavens 
and the earth in the Beginning, when that 
Thing, out of which the earth was to come^ was 
that out of which all the universe of worlds were 
to come. That Thing was without form, and 
void ; and darkness was upon the face of that 
deep. And the Spirit of God brooded upon the 
face of those Waters. Therefore, that first 
Thing, out of which the universe and the earth 
became what they are, h formless. Therefore, 
it is a boundless thing. It was " In the 'begin- 
ning,'^^ Therefore it was an uncreated thing. 

And what may it he f — this formless and void, 
4 



50 The First Words From God. 

this infinite, uncreate, eternal thing? No word 
can define it. No combination of words. In it 
two inseparable, irreconcilable truths and facts 
unite in a union not to be understood. For it 
is uncreate, eternal, infinite Force, ever with 
and QyQvfrom the Infinite Eternal Spirit. 

From a law or condition of our own being 
some light may be thrown upon what, in creat- 
ing, the Creator does, in part, by means of this 
ineffable force. From our own spirit there is a 
ceaseless emanation of Force — as indeed there is 
from everything that lives. It seems to be one 
of the conditions of life. Into our own concep- 
tion of our own being this not entirely compre- 
hensible force hardly enters. It hardly seems 
to be a part of ourselves. And yet the fact is as 
well known, as familiar as any other fact, that 
the force emanating from ourselves may exist 
when no longer a part of ourselves, when it is 
separated from us, when it is out of our reach, 
is beyond our control. An infant rolls a marble 
from its hand, and then, by the spirit in the child 
and from the spirit in the child, force goes into 
and stays in the rolling ball. The child has 
parted that Force from himself and placed it in 
other conditions where the force has a new and 



The First Words From God. ' 51 

different selfhood. Our Creator made us in His 
own image, after His own likeness ; wherefore 
the power of our own spirit — and it is a marvel- 
ous power — which causes force to exist in new 
forms and conditions — is a semblance of power 
in God. 

In and of itself, that divine power is of no 
creative force and effect. In creating it is put 
forth until the astronomer counts millions of 
worlds ; and yet, the making of the universe was 
not a necessary consequence of the "waters^^ of 
infinity. That God was free to create or not to 
create — as to which there has heen much jphil- 
osojphic debate — is told in what is said of His 
resting on the Seventh Day. And our Lord 
tells of glory that He had '^ before the loorld 
was,^^ Creation came of the free will of God ; 
or, more wisely be it said, it came of His love 
which sent into the world His Son. To the 
uncounted worlds the Cross of the Christ will 
become the highest manifestation of God's love. 
" There is no reason to think that anything sim- 
ilar has occurred, or will ever again occur, in the 
annals of eternity. It stands amid the lapse of 
ages and the waste of worlds a single and solitary 
monument." Of his cross, Christ Jesus said, 



52 The First Words From God. 

'• If I be lifted up I will draw " — not all men^ 
hut — " I will draw all unto me." 

To return to thoughts on the Infinite Force 
of the Infinite Spirit in creation. We have no 
power to create and therefore we have no faculty 
for knowing what, in itself^ creation is. Matter 
is devoid of motion, yet in matter there is force. 
Its power to resist proves it with a certainty that 
almost equals the certainty of a self-evident truth. 
And that force is from God. But how matter 
is compacted and fashioned of that divine force 
w^e cannot tell. How is form given to formless 
force ? How are things made ? How do mate- 
rial substances come to have a real selfhood of 
their own, to be objects of sight and touch ? To 
such questioning there is no answer. We can- 
not go behind the facts. The secret of creation 
is the Creator^ s secret. 



The First Words From God. 53 



CHAPTEE XIII. 

From our inquiry thus far into wliat God has 
told of His creative work, one conclusion here 
invites to our doing justice to the human wisdom 
of the early ages of the world. For we have 
found that the infinite force of the Infinite 
Spirit is a first principle in the being of all 
created things ; that, to all the things that are 
made, there is imparted by means of this force a 
selfhood of their own ; wherefore^ one ancient 
Cosniologic idea, namely, that matter^ in all its 
forms and conditions^ is alio ays and every where 
essentially of one and the same essence^ is truth 
and fact. 

And we reach another conclusion, namely : 
that what is revealed of the imparted Force or 
Energy of the Infinite Spirit so anticipates as 
to be in striking accord with the recent scientific 
discovery of the correlative equivalence and per- 
sistence of force, the truth and fact that force 
cannot be created or destroyed by man ; * that 



* I am glad to ask attention to the elucidation of the scien- 
tific, philosophic, and religious relations of the recent Idea of 



54 The First Words From God. 

while the forms of its manifestation are almost 
infinite in number, in itself force is unchange- 
able, is the same thing forever and ever. 

Faraday once said, " I have long been of an 
opinion almost amounting to a conviction, in 
common with many other lovers of natural 
knowledge, that the various forms under which 
the force of matter are made manifest have one 
common origin ; or, in other words, are so directly 
related and mutually dependent, that they are 
convertible, as it were, into one another, and 
possess equivalents of power in their action." 

Now the evidence of tliat sublime truth and 
fact so nearly amounts to demonstration, that 
what Cudworth said of the Original Life of the 
Soul may be said of Force, — " Tliis is substan- 
tial, neither generable or corruptible, but only 
creatable and annihilable by the Deity." 

Passing beyond its idea of atoms which, Her- 



Force in an essay, *'0n Recent Physical Theories in their 
Bearing on the Theistic Argument," by the late Professor B. 
P. Martin, Ph.D., read in 1881 before the Regents of the Uni- 
versity of the State of New York, printed by them in their 
Tt^ansactions, and republished in the Journal of Christian 
Philosophy, Vol. I, 1882. Of the many articles on Evolution 
which have reached me it is the best— which is saying a great 
deal ; and is so great a gain to sound thinking on a new and 
difficult problem, that I have no words with which to express 
its value. 



The First Words From God. 55 

schel said, "have the cliaracteristics of manu- 
factured articles," science, witli its new con- 
ception of Force, lias entered the outer chamber 
of the presence of the Eternal. It has wrought 
its difficult, toilsome way to an idea of Force 
which belongs with truths that have ever more 
and more shone, and will ever more and more 
shine from the Bible, attesting its heavenly 
origin. 

Of this it may be some confirmation that by 
the will of God, " who chooseth weak things to 
confound the mighty, whose sure testimonies 
make wise the simple," it was given me to see 
in advance of its scientific announcement, that 
the truths which Faraday — sage, and seer, and 
saint — beheld in vision, were truth and fact 
revealed in the First Words from on High. Of 
that foresight there is proof in "The Church 
and Science ; or, the Ancient Hebraic Idea of 
Creation." 

Since that book was printed, rather than pub- 
lished, in 1860, and since the first copy of this 
book was written (1862) the mode of scientific 
thinking has more nearly come, in boldness of 
analogical reasoning, to resemble the thinking of 
old ; and the last grandest conclusion of modern 



56 The First Words From God. 

science, tliongli the result of precise, convincing 
experiments and firmly based on facts, was fnlly 
reached by the old way of reasoning. For that 
idea of Force lacks complete experiniental verifi- 
cation, as Gravitation, has not been proved to 
be within the assumed correlation or identity 
of all Force. 

And whoever refiects upon these things will 
feel the truth and force of the last sentence of our 
opening chapter, namely, that were the methods 
of old and later time combined, the wisdom of 
man would still lack what can be supplied only 
from the words of God his Lawgiver. 



The First Words From God. 57 



CHAPTEK XIY. 

Passing on to the other Cosmologic truth, let 
us inquire whether it was known to the Hebrews 
tliat the earth is a living thing. And knowing 
well that the idea, itself, will seem almost incon- 
ceivable, I make haste to prove the fact, " In 
the Beginning was the Word, and the Word was 
with God, and the Word was God. All things 
were made by Him, and without Him there was 
not anything. That which was made in Him 
was life." Those words reach to plants, to 
animals, to man, to the earth itself. They re- 
veal that each and every created thing lives. 

The large eye of common sense plainly sees 
that Nature has her Laws. This is confirmed 
by Scripture, revealing that Nature, by Force 
imparted from the Creator and accoi'ding to His 
plan and purpose, goes on by herself. " Be- 
hold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong 
wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces 
the rocks before the Lord ; but the Lord was 
not in the wind : and after the wind an earth- 
quake ; but the Lord was not in the earthquake : 



68 The First "Words From God. 

and after the earthquake a fire ; but the Lord was 
not in tlie fire" (1 Kings xix, 11, 12). Holy 
Scripture also reveals, that although God made 
Nature thus to be apart from Himself, He is 
the upholding, sustaining ground of Nature, for 
it is written^ that "in Him we live and move, and 
have our being." How these facts agree cannot 
be known. It is not for finite beings to com- 
prehend the ways of the Infinite Being. 

Yet other facts that are little thought of are 
involved in the fact that Nature has her Self- 
hood and her Law. For where Law is, there 
must be a subject intelligent of Law. And 
wherever there is intelligence there must be 
Life. And in all that is made Life is the 
inmost realitv. Life is the secret hidden in 
the unseen power which binds the par- 
ticles of a pebble, and in the Universe bears 
the name of the attraction of Gravitation. 
Plato and others of the ancients thought the 
stars were living things. They are bright 
centers of the Life which fills ethereal space ; 
a dim perception of which awakens mys- 
terious, sublime emotions, when in the still 
night the soul unconsciously communes with the 
life in the deep on high. 



The First Words From God. 59 

I have now to prove the rendering before 
given of John i, 3. It differs from that in our 
received version, only because of a different 
pointing of the paragraph. In old Greek manu- 
scripts there were no points. The pointing here 
was the only pointing thought of in the iirst 
four hundred Christian years; and, therefore, 
the meaning here given to tlie verse was then its 
meaning in the Christian Church. In all those 
many years the Fathers so understood it."^ 

The Fathers quoted those words as often as 
any sacred words — Irenseus eleven times. Those 
Fathers wrote in Greek. And all this is so 
authoritative, so final, that there is no need of 
other confirmation of the rendering that has 
here been given. 

Therefore, these words of God reveal that the 
Earth is a living thing. Yet the revelation of 



*I once wrote. To that there Is no exception; but a note to 
the Translation of the Fragments of Hippoly tus. in the Oxford 
Library of the Fathers, reads : "John 1, 3. Hippolytus puts 
the full stop at the ovde, attaching the 6 yeyovev to the 
following. So also Irenaeus. Clemens, Alexander, Origen. 
Theophilus of Antioeh, and Eusebius, in several places. So of 
the Latin Fathers, Tertullian, Lactantius, Victorinus. Augus- 
tine. This punctuation was also adopted by the heretics. 
Valentinus. Heracleon, Theodotus, and therefore was rejected 
by Epiphanius and Chrysostom. The note says that a strange 
conclusion drawn from it by those heretics led to the two 
exceptions to the rendering otherwise uniformly accepted. 



60 The First Words From God. 

the fact in Hebrew Scriptures is still to be 
proved. Of this, the proof will not here be 
exhaustive. It will be brief, yet decisive. That 
truth and fact are made known in the first chap- 
ters of Genesis by the name there given to the 
whole process of the earth's making. That 
name is Generation. The LXX named the 
first of the five books of Moses the Generation, 
from the subject with which it begins ; as they 
named his second book of the Bible the Exodus, 
the Going Fortli, from the great thing of which 
it tells. Our version keeps for the first book of 
the Bible their Greek name, Genesis. 

The Hebrews named that book from its first 
word. The LXX could have done the same in 
Greek ; and, as their title, unlike that of the Ex- 
odus, does not cover its whole, it shows the idea 
the LXX had of its earliest chapters. Their 
Greek word can have the sense of origin merely ; 
but like the English word Generation, it usually 
refers to what is from a living source. 

That word Genesis should have heen trans- 
lated. Then our name for the world's making 
would not have been the Creation. It would 
have heen the Generation ! Then how much of 
old thought, of right thought, of Biblical revela- 



The First Words From God. 61 

tion that name would have carried with it! 
And, in the first chapter of the Bible, the truth 
and fact that the earth lives comes out in the 
words, ^' God said, Let the earth bring forth — 
and the earth brought forth," and, evidently 
referring to Genesis i, 11, our Lord said, " The 
Earth bringeth forth fruit of herself." 

A voice of the soul is heard in poetry that, 
elsewhere by the wand of Science, is enchanted 
into silence, as in these lines : 

**Froin tlie high host of stars to the lulled lake, and 
mountain coast, 
All is concentered in a life intense, 

Where not a beam, nor air, nor leaf is lost. 
But hath a part of being, and a sense 
Of that which is of all Creator and Defense." 

In despite of science and without fear of pan- 
theism the soul accepts this. The Psalmist goes 
beyond it in words in which there is the spirit 
of much of sacred poetry : " Praise ye the Lord, 
fire and hail, snow and vapors, stormy windful- 
filling His wordj mountains and all hills, fruitful 
trees and all cedars, let them praise the Lord." 
This is poetry, it will be said ; but is poetry — 
divinely inspired poetry — nonsense ? The mod- 
ern and ancient bards wrote nonsense, unless 
they had a right conception (however imperfect 



62 The Fikst Words From God. 

in the former) of the Life in nature. Only 
that can justify our admiration for the modern, 
our reverence for that sacred poetry. And our 
Lord, Himself, who breathed into all Scripture 
its undying life, confirmed what was in that 
Psalm when, on the lake of Galilee, He said to 
the storm, "Peace, be still." Then came to 
pass what was written of the stormy wind ful- 
filling His word. 

It was decreed that the Earth should " hring 
forth^'^ but in the sacred unveiling of the mar- 
vels of creation, where is the fact of its conceiv- 
ing ? This inquiry is of great moment, for a 
plant-creating power in the earth would make 
the earth share in a power that belongs to God 
alone. In the Irooding of the Spirit on the 
face of the " waters " of Infinity, the indispen- 
sable fact comes to light. 

Rationalists here find only a wind. Yet even 
Gesenius says : "' The Spirit of God incubated 
[brooded] f ovens et vivificansP Dr. McCaul 
says the verb here is never used of the wind; 
that in Scripture the Spirit gives Life to all 
creatures, in the 104th Psahn to the Plants, 
"O Lord, thou sendest forth thy Spirit and 
renewest the face of the Earth." Yet com- 



The First Words From God. 63 

mentators are unwilling to dwell on the brood- 
ing of the Spirit ; and, as the received version 
and the late translation also thus almost keep 
it out of sight : " The Spirit of God moved on 
the face of the waters," I give Tayler Lewis's 
confirmation of Lange's better rendering, hovered. 
" The conception of brooding, cherishing, is fun- 
damental in the word. Its primary sense is a 
vibrating, throbbing motion, emblematic of the 
beginning of Life, of heat, and pulsation. The 
Piel form makes the inward sense of throbbing 
more intensive. No word could have been 
better adapted to the idea of an inward, life- 
giving power, rather than a mere mechanical 
outward motion, such as is given by the trans- 
lation hlew or moved upon. Nowhere in all the 
usage of the Hebrew or the Syriac is it ever 
employed in the sense of hlowing. In Syriac it 
is the common word for loving, warming, cher- 
ishing. In Arabic the middle gutteral is softened 
down to aUph. It there denotes intense and 
cherishino^ love." 

To those not thankful for the clear human 
way in which our Maker speaks to us, the w^ord 
brooding may sound strangely; yet it conveys 
the idea which the Father of Life was here 



64 The First Words From God. 

pleased to convey. For then to those " waters " of 
Infinity out of which came the universe, tlie 
Eternal Spirit imparted potentialities that, in 
what was afterward to be the Earth, took on 
the invisible and the visible properties of earthly 
life. In the same instant, the Eternal Word 
sent forth the element^ Light, which is ever 
with life, and then the Eternal Spirit and the 
Eternal Word — as persons distinct, yet never 
apart, in action and influence — by their conjoint 
simultaneous energy, giving life to the universe, 
began its creation in Time. 



The First Words From God. 65 



CHAPTER XY. 

As we pass on from Genesis i, 1-6, let us 
recall all that it makes known, that the contrast 
between its universal breadth and the limi- 
tation of what comes after it may clearly be 
seen. 

The Origin of all that is created, is made 
known in what is revealed as taking place in 
Day One, in the going forth of the element^ 
Light, and in the hrooding of the Spirit on the 
formless, boundless waters of Infinity. 

After the First Words from on High thus 
begin, (as reverently we think they would be- 
gin,) then they pass on, (as again we may 
reverently think they might,) to the suc- 
cessive stages, periods, or days in the making 
of man's world. Those words, whose specific 
and almost exclusive purpose is to reveal the 
kindness of God in His fitting up of the Earth 
as the house and home of man, thus begin : 
"God said. Let there be a firmament." And, 
here, we strike on what many take to be an 
insuperable bar to belief. They say the firma- 



66 The First Words From God. 

merit means a solid arch that upholds an ocean. 
Said by Voltaire, re-said by Gesenius and other 
scholars of note, it is now fiercely reiterated by 
all the assailants of what is revealed of creation. 
They try to prove this by giving to such Scripture 
phrases as "the pillars," "doors," "windows" 
of heaven a literal interpretation, though every- 
where just such language is figuratively used. 
And in ti-ying to convict the Hebrews of believ- 
ing that the sky, where clouds gather and birds 
fly, was a solid vault, they try to convict them 
of ignorance, grosser than the ignorance of 
savages, and of unnatural stupidity. 

Tliis ridiculous^ charge starts from the rare 
word Firmament^ used nine times in tlie first of 
Genesis, and not so many times elsewhere in all 
the Bible. That infrequent use of the word so 
looks back to Genesis that it gives little help as to 
its meaning tliere. It is now generally rendered 
" an expanse," from what is taken to be its root 
meaning. Be that as it m>ay / only those who 
have wasted their time over the mound of trash 
piled up around the word firmament can know 
how much the notion, that to the Hebrews 
it meant a solid arch, delights those who try to 
dishonor the Bible, and troubles those who, at 



The First Words From God. 67 

this point, try to defend the Bible. There 
would have been nothing of all this had those 
assailants and those defenders understood the 
meaning of the term " waters " in the Gth, 7th, 
and 8th verses of the first chapter of Genesis. 
When that is understood, those verses tell what 
the firmament was made for. They tell what 
the firmament does. And it is of small conse- 
quence whether the meaning that hides in its 
name be known or not when it is known what 
a thing is made for and what it does — a ther- 
mometer or a stethoscope, for instance. 

" God said. Let there be a firmament in 
the midst of the waters, and let it divide the 
waters from the waters. And God made the 
firmament, and divided the waters which were 
under the firmament from the waters which 
were above the firmament : and it was so. And 
God called the firmament Heaven. And the 
evening and the morning were the second day." 

Those words define the Firmament. They 
state the Decree, its purpose, the carrying out of 
its purpose, and what the Firmament now is. 
It is decreed that in those waters^ to which the 
sending forth of the element Light and the brood- 
ing of the Spirit had given Life, there shall be a 



68 The First Words From God. 

dividing off of as much of those waters as was 
to become the Earth. Evidently, in the making 
of the Earth, such a division was the first thing 
to be made. 

Two things went to the making of that Firma- 
ment. The earlier was the separating out of so 
much of the waters of Infinity as were to be 
transformed into those mundane waters out 
of which the dry land afterwards appeared. 
In the Second Cycle, the finger of the great 
Artificer drew His line of division around what 
was to become the house of man ; not, as 
afterwards told, a line of absolute separation, 
yet a line of permanent seclusion, marking out 
and measuring off its space. He tlien gave to 
our World its individual place and being in the 
Universe. 

To the words, "God said, Let there be a 
firmament," these words, " And God made the 
firmament," are joined. After that there comes 
almost a repetition of the words of the decree. 
And all this marks how great a thing was the 
setting apart of our world, and the making it a 
world by itself. That was a great thing! For 
it may be said of our little Bethlehem-world, as 
was said of one of the least of its villages: 



The First Words From God. 69 

"Thou Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be 
little among the thousands of Israel, yet out of 
thee shall He come forth that is to be Enler, 
whose goings forth have been from of old, 
a diebus eternitatis " — so in the Yulgate ; and 
in the margin of our version — ^'from the days 
of eternity P 

The latter part of the twofold work of tlie 
Second Cycle is thus revealed : " God called the 
firmament Heaven," — made it the atmosphere 
of our world. This part of the creative work of 
the Second Cycle, no doubt, was carried on by 
natural processes, as such are spoken of in 
other cycles. As to those, science has found 
out some things and reasonably conjectured 
others. Of those tilings nothing is revealed. 
Yet the idea, that in the Second Cycle, what was 
to become the world of man was detached from 
the mass of the sun and became a satellite mov- 
ing around the sun could readily enough have 
been received by the first Man and by the 
earliest men. It is some evidence of this that 
the idea of the Earth's revolution around the 
sun was accepted by astronomers who lived long 
before Ptolemy, whose system rejected, and 
until revived by Copernicus, superseded that 



70 The First Words From God. 

older system taught in Greece by Pythagoras, 
who learned it in Chaldea and Egypt. 

The swift yet clear allusion in the Book of 
Job to the roundness of the globe — " God hang- 
eth the earth uj[>on nothing " — is far more decis- 
ive. The Book of Job may well have been a 
very ancient book, for it raises and answers the 
question, " Is there any care for the world ? " — 
the human question troubling all human souls 
from the time of the Fall of Man. 

Its religion is the religion of Melchizedek and 
of Abraham, and it accords with the fact 
that men of the highest order are born in clus- 
ters; that in the day of men so great as Mel- 
chizedek and Abraham, there lived a writer 
equally great, and it is not only a gross im- 
probability, but an absolute impossibility, that 
the author of the Book of Job tried to keep the 
Mosaic religion out of his words, and out of his 
thoughts, and completely succeeded in doing it, 
while Zion and the Temple were to him what 
they were in the minds and hearts of tlie Psalm- 
ists of Israel. So it would be now, and so it 
must have been in a time of less-trained liter- 
ary power. It is, therefore, certain that the 
Book of Job antedates the era of Moses. And 



The Fikst Words From God. 71 

the astronomical fact stated in the quoted 
words, with the allusions to Orion and the 
Pleiades, and to the arts of the time — for exam- 
ple, in what is said of mining — prove that more 
things were known of old than has usually been 
thought. All I have said of the reach of the 
ancient mind might safely be rested on the 
words quoted; and, as the fact of the round- 
ness of the globe is not an easy one to con- 
ceive of, those words go to prove that any sci- 
entific fact could have been received by men 
of earliest time.* 

Yet the religious, spiritual end and aim of the 
first word from on high did not call for the tell- 
ing of such geologic or astronomic facts. That 
end and aim was fulfilled by the telling of the 

* From the Journal of the Victoria Institute, No. 74, page 123, 
this is taken -: " The brilliant French writer, De Maistre, who 
died some half a century ago, maintained the doctrine that 
the human race once occupied a position of intellectual 
greatness, in which men were able to discern general ideas of 
truth directly by the efforts of their own minds, instead of 
being obliged, as at present, to follow the inductive process. 
This state of things he considered to have left vestiges behind 
in the shape of a variety of traditions spread over the whole 
face of the earth— traditions which can only be understood on 
the supposition that they are relics of some higher system of 
knowledge. He lays the scene of this wonderful diffusion 
of a priori knowledge before the Flood. That catastrophe, 
he thinks, destroyed it; though Noah and his family preserved 
and transmitted some vestiges of it, which the priests of 
Egypt and the old kings learned and evinced in the wonderful 



72 The First Words From God. 

earlier part of the work of the second day, and 
by the words^ "God called the firmament 
Heaven " — words revealing that the firmament, 
when a completed thing, was our atmosphere, 
so indispensable to earthly life, our blue sky 
with all its phenomena. Wherefore^ they are 
foolish and wicked who try to discredit the 
voice from God, by saying it tells of a solid 
vault over the earth, for by that same Voice 
which tells of the making of the firmament, the 
birds are spoken of as flying " in the open firm- 
ament of heaven." "^ 

Nothing is told after the 8th verse of those 
" waters^'' out of which the separation, of those 
that were afterwards to become the earth, was a 
part of the making of the firmament ; and, as to 

genius and skill displayed in the Cyclopean architecture of 
prehistoric days, and the science of the Chaldean and Egyp- 
tian priesthood." 

*Iu the 14th, 15th, and 17th verses the firmament of the 
heavens. thrice comes in; and the context is such, that the 
phrase there seems to suggest that the firmament in which 
the sun is set vfiay he distinct from the firmament of the 
earth. And if, for the sun, there be a firmament distinct from 
that of the earth, there may be a firmament for each star, 
giving a charming diversity to the worlds of the universe, 
delighting the soul when no longer fettered, as now, by place 
and time: 

" Away, away, without a wing. 
O'er all, through all, its thought shall fly, 

A nameless and eternal thing. 
Forgetting what it was to die." 



The First Words From God. 73 

those " waters " of Infinity, nothing farther is 
to be looked for. Yet before the making of the 
firmament began, the Spirit brooded on the face 
of all those ''waters^^ with effects other than 
those most closely pertaining to the earth. Of 
such unrevealed effects, one may have been the 
existence beyond, above, around, within our 
world of that something by ancient sages named 
the Ether and thought of as finer, more subtile, 
than air. That everywhere there is an ethereal 
something capable of resisting w^as a metapliys- 
ical notion with them — with men of science now 
it seems to be an established fact. This vindi- 
cates the much ridiculed old axiom, that "nature 
abhors a vacuumP And, almost unconsciously 
doing honor to the half-forgotten wisdom of 
long-past ages, men of science now give to that 
space-filling force the name of Ether — the name 
it had with the wise of old. 



74 The First Words From God. 



CHAPTER XYL 

I PASS on to touch upon a part of what is told 
of the work of the Third Cycle. Science has 
proved that once our world was an ocean with- 
out a shore — a fact revealed in the words, " And 
God said, Let the Dry Land appear." Of that it 
is written in the 104th Psalm, "Thou didst 
cover the earth with the sea as with a garment. 
The waters stood above the mountains. At Thy 
rebuke they fled. At the voice of Thy thunder 
they hasted away. The mountains go up, the 
valleys go down into the place Thou hast ap- 
pointed for them." As to the all-encompassing 
sea and the emergence of the land, this is more 
full than what was told at first, and volumes on 
volumes of geology are filled with the marvelous 
story ; yet, the few words in Genesis tell all 
there was to be told. 

On that third day " God said. Let the earth 
bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and 
the fruit-tree yielding fruit." Some infidel 
scientists, and some of the quasi-orthodox, argue 
that here the Sacred Oracle errs, because grass 



The First Words From God. 75 

is not the lowliest, earliest form of plant-life. 
To this Common Sense answers, — that in so com- 
prehensive and short a revelation of the great 
facts in the world's making, the Decree of Veg- 
etation would not be a text-book of botany ; 
would not inventory all plants in all the long 
ages of their many and varying developments ; 
and would set forth the great fact of the estab- 
lishment of an abiding vegetable kingdom in 
general terms. 

That great decree established the whole veg- 
etable kingdom. In the decree that kingdom is 
iitly and fully represented by grass, the earth's 
clothing ; by plants, and fruit-bearing trees ; 
and, as might be looked for, in this statement of 
the decree, that kingdom is described as Tcnown 
to man. Wherefore^ in tracing plant-life from 
its earliest, lowliest forms to the oak, tlie palm, 
the fig-tree, the vine, science traces out in detail 
the fulfilling of a general and continuous decree. 

The phrase " evening was^ morning was " 
goes to confirm the trutli of this. That phrase 
is of twofold significance, and here we only 
mark its leading away from tlie thought of the 
times in creation as days of twenty-four hours. 
Six is their number, the order of their succession 



76 The First Words From God. 

is a fixed order, but tlie phrase, " evening was, 
morning was," tal^es away from the word Day all 
sharpness of limit, all well-defined outline. It 
makes it so indefinite as to duration, so pliant, 
so fluent, that the fullness of such a day might 
come in a cycle other than that in which it 
began, might be reached almost anywhere in the 
time of the creation. 

It accords with all this that the Decrees, em- 
powering the earth to bring forth plants and 
animals, did not ordain a single, solitary act. 
Yet the abiding force and effect of those de- 
crees, that they were of continuing power, is 
too little thought of. For they decreed the exist- 
ence and function of powers that were to be 
put forth not for once only^ not in the Third 
Cycle only^ but throughout all of the follow- 
ing days. Science has proved this too seldom 
noted revealed truth. For the fossil plants and 
animals, which geologists dig up by thousands, 
and whose strange uncouthness they marshal in 
their museums to our wonder, are signs and 
proofs of ihQ working on of those great powers 
toward their finest, best effects for ages on ages, 
from evening to morning. 



The First Words From God. 77 



CHAPTER XVII. 

Light in its form of sunlight is not indispen- 
sable to the plant world. Cedars of Lebanon 
and oaks of Bashan might have had centuries 
of growth and decay without the sun ; yet sun- 
light is indispensable to the animal world ; and 
the work of the Fourth Day, when the sun be- 
came a daylight giving orb was after the crea- 
tion of the vegetable world and hefore the 
creation of the animal world. 

Yet the bearing of other facts told of the 
Fourth Day is of far greater consequence, though 
hardly thought of. In the first verse of Gen- 
esis the revelation of the creation of the sun is 
involved in the revelation of the creation of all 
things ; and in a description of the making of 
the earth more than this would have been out of 
place. Therefore, the work of the Fourth Day 
pertains only to what concerns our world ; and 
in that cycle of its making the sun became 
the regulator of our Time. Of its many ben- 
efits to man this is the first that is spoken of, 
an intimation that in the mind of the Creator 



78 The First Words From God. 

this is the greatest of its benefit^ so far as this 
world is concerned. 

An English scientist, unaware of the likeness 
of his grandiloquence to that of an old fire 
worshiper, ludicrously chants a well-known prose 
hymn to the sun. His song celebrates what is 
real and good, but would be good for nothing if 
there were only lunatics on the earth, and there 
would be lunatics only were it not for that of- 
fice work of the sun, first revealed and with em- 
phatic repetition. For the sanity of the human 
race depends on the time-measuring, time-regu- 
lating office of the sun, moon, and stars. In 
fever, delirium, or madness the idea of regulated 
time is lost. With its loss regulated thought is 
lost, and the soul is chaotic and wild. Where- 
fore, so far as our world is concerned, the sun 
and moon were not only or chiefly made to 
be luminaries; their greatest office was to be 
"for signs and for seasons, for days and for 
years." 

" The stars also." This is a part of a sentence 
in which the sun and moon are said to rule the 
time of our world, and it is governed by the 
verb governing the sentence. The stars, then, 
are not slightingly spoken of, as infidels charge ; 



The First Words From God. 79 

they share in the highest office of the sun and 
moon. 

Of the size and distance of the sun and moon 
nothing is told, and the like is true of the stars 
and of their number ; but surely nothing as to 
those things is to be looked for in a description 
of the making of man's world ; though elsewhere 
the Bible plainly intimates that the number of 
the stars is greater than the number seen by the 
naked eye. 

Of old. King David looking up to the heavens 
cried out, " What is man ! " and the telescope 
adds little of appreciable moral worth to that 
which the naked eye may gain from the skies. 
It may lessen it ; for in looking at the countless 
myriads of the heavenly hosts belief in the per- 
sonality of their Maker is sometimes lost; as 
when, with self-complacent conceit, Laplace 
said, " The heavens declare only the glory of the 
astronomer ! " 

The Bible reveals that God is everywhere 
present in all that He made. And this truth 
is inwrought into the form of prayer given by 
our Lord ; for in " Our Father which art in 
heaven," there it is the plural, rocg ovpavotg, 
that is, "which art in all the universe," while in 



80 The First Words From God. 

" Thy will be done as it is done in heaven," 
there is the singular, rov opavov^ which agrees 
with other Scriptures as to God's dwelling 
place. 

If it be inquired, do the Hebrew Scriptures 
know anything of the heavens as revealed by 
the telescope, the answer is. They do, though 
they do not speak of them as they are usually 
thought of by us. 

We think of the breadth of the heavens, 
they of their height. Their heavens are three- 
fold, the atmospheric heavens of clouds and 
storms, the celestial heavens of the sun, moon, 
and stars, and above, beyond, and outside of 
these is the unutterable height of that third 
heaven into which St. Paul was caught up. 
Science has sublimities of her own, but they fall 
far short of those revealed in the Bible, in 
which He who made and upholds the universe 
transcends it. He calls by their names, the 
millions of stars the telescope discovers and 
the millions it never can discover, and He 
holds all those worlds " in the hollow of His 
hand," 



The P'irst Words From God. 81 



CHAPTEE XVIII. 

In a consecutive retelling of what was not 
told all at once, breaks are to be looked for. At 
the fourth verse of chapter second there may 
have been such a break, thougli between what 
goes before and what comes with and after that 
transition verse, there is a close relation. 

John Asbruc, physician to Louis XY, who 
died in Paris in 1766, started the notion that 
the putting together of two differing traditions 
begins with that verse. And since his time, 
infidels and quasi-Christians have hacked and 
hewed at Holy Scripture as eagerly as yelling 
red Indians hack and hew the white body of a 
Christian captive. No reverence have they for 
the unity of the Word of God, and no more care 
for or knowledge of its beauty than red Indians 
have for the charm of civilization ! 

With a unity of plan, whose like is not in any- 
thing written by man, the Bible sets forth the seen 
and the unseen, the temporal and the eternal, 
what this world is and what it ought to be. The 
analogue of this is the inscrutable union of the 



82 The First Words From God. 

body and the soul in us, of the invisible and the 
visible, the immaterial and the material. In 
oar body no bone, or ligament, or nerve can be 
dispensed with, whether its needed use and rela- 
tion to the rest of our frame be known or not ; 
and there is no name, or date, or line, or word in 
the Bible that does not contribute to the perfec- 
tion of its unity. We cannot always tell how^ 
yet the fact is known from the result, and it is 
proved by the result, both in that Hebrew 
Scripture, which the Lord said '' could not be 
broken," and in all Scripture as completed by 
the Lord. 

In the opening of the Bible there is a twofold 
setting forth of Creation, based on the facts 
that the World was made for Man and was made 
for the Son of Man, was made for the Adam and 
and for the Christ ; and without a twofold set- 
ting forth of the twofold purpose in the World's 
creation the opening of the Bible would not ac- 
cord with the rest of the Bible. 

Here, this also is to be thought of: Adam 
heard the voice which shut him out of Paradise; 
he heard the Promise whose visible fulfillment 
in Christ Jesus was so long afterward, and he 
could have told out of his own memory of what 



The First Words From God. 83 

took place in the Garden ; yet so strange those 
marvels, of such momentous, far-reaching, ever- 
lasting consequence are they that as to the revela- 
tion of them some special impress of the sign- 
manual of God seems to be needed. 

What should be the form of that twofold 
revelation or how put together, or what, if any, 
the special authentication of such human w^itness 
we cannot determine beforehand ; and yet when 
a strongly marked conclusion ends the one 
Scripture and what God alone witnessed opens 
the other — speaking of an untenanted Earth un- 
fertilized by Eain, and of the creation of the 
plants before they grew — then, here the divine 
seal is plain. 

The fourth, fifth, and sixth verses of chapter 
second are a transition paragraph, and in it the 
fifth and sixth verses are a parenthesis : * " (4) 
These are the generations of the heavens and 
the earth when they were created, in the day 
that the Lord God made the earth and the 
heavens. (5) And every plant of the field be- 
fore it was in the earth, and every herb of the 



* A parenthesis, thrown into add to or to clear up things, 
usually is abrupt and not as easy to construe as straightfor- 
ward narrative. 



84 The Fikst Words From God. 

field before it grew : ^ for the Lord God had 
not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there 
was not a man to till the ground. (6) But there 
went up a mist from the earth, and watered the 
whole face of tlie ground." f 

"These^^ almost always refers to something be- 
fore ; and here in verse fourth shows it connects 
what has been told with what is to be told. 
The paragraph and wliat goes with it after- 
wards continues and perfects the recital before 
it ; and that man is to be its special subject is 
intimated by the changed place of the word 
" earth " when used in verse fourth for the second 
time. % The parenthesis — verses five and six — 
like the first verse of chapter one, speaks of 
Creation in Eternity and then it speaks of Crea- 
tion in Time. Of each it tells in a way of its 
own. It states new facts about the Creation, 

*0f the paragraph Lewis says: *' As might be expected in a 
summary and recapitulation there is no chronology in it." 
Also that *'/or " may as well here be rendered whe7i,as the 
parenthesis means that after all spoken of then man was 
made." 

t The rendering of the paragraph in the late Translation 
gives an easier and more plausible sense, but it is not that of 
the received version of the Septuagint or of the Vulgate. 

t When in this verse by the heavens and the earth the uni- 
verse is meant, the earth is put in the last place ; here and in 
the same verse it is put in the first place. The phrase is one 
that is often used, but its form as here is found only in Psalm 
civ, 13. 



The First Words From God. 85 

man's knowledge of which must have come from 
God. And on comparing what is told of Man's 
Creation in chapter one and in the parenthesis, 
it is seen that the prominent thing in the one is 
the making of man in the " likeness " of God, 
tliat he may have dominion (i, 26, 27, 28) ; in 
the other that the Lord God breathed into his 
nostrils the breath of " lives," and so in that 
special way the Adam was endowed with a liv- 
ing soul. The one tells of the office given to 
man, the other of the life of his soul. And 
having pointed back to the making of the 
house of man and given a fresh recital of 
man's creation from its own point of view, 
swiftly passing on to his fall into sin tlirough 
the tempting of the evil spirit, it records the 
promise of one, of woman born, who will de- 
stroy the devil and his works. The Bible 
thence onw^ard, as here, is the revelation of the 
Great Redemption by the Eternal Word in 
form as man, " born of the Yirgin Mary, cruci- 
fied under Pontius Pilate." Wherefore with 
manifest fitness, in the seventh verse, for the 
first time, the Messianic name Lord — that is, 
Jehovah, the self-revealing — is prefixed to the 
word God. And yet the plain reason for that 



86 The First Words From God. 

coiribinatiou and for its use here and afterward, 
does not restrain infidels and quasi-Christians 
from persistently misusing it as evidence that 
the first two chapters of Genesis are made up of 
differing traditions. 



The First Words From God. 87 



CHAPTER XIX. 

In the revelation of the making of the earth 
there can be nothing uncalled for, nothing super- 
fluous ; yet reiteration is one of its character- 
istics, as seen in this instance, " God said, Let 
the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding 
seed, the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind : 
and it was so. The earth brought forth grass, 
herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree 
yielding fruit, whose seed is in itself, after his 
kind." And there are frequent repetitions of the 
same phrase. 

These things are unlooked for in a revela- 
tion so great and so brief— thirty-six verses only 
— yet they heighten our sense of its reality and 
of the authority that abides in it forever. " God 
said," is repeated eight times ; and, as should 
have been noticed sooner, if we put the pronoun 
I where the name of God now is in the opening 
chapters of the Bible, it agrees with and con- 
firms the idea that what God himself told, Adam 
retold. ^' God saw it was good " conies in six 
times. It comes not after the Second Day, 



88 The First Words From God. 

but all the Days are covered by its final repeti- 
tion, ''God saw everything He liad made, and, 
behold, it was very good "—it was all suited to 
His purpose for man. 

The repeated announcement of that truth and 
its last full and strong enforcement kindly 
guards against the once deep-rooted and wide- 
spread error that evil inheres in matter ; an error 
whose power to harm is not entirely gone. And 
those words kindly change the feeling, so strong 
at times, that a world where storms vex the sea, 
floods and cyclones waste the lands, a world 
with the volcano, the earthquake, and the pestil- 
ence is not a good world. In foresight of the 
fall of man our world was so fashioned as to aid 
the sinful to become good. Our world was not 
made for holy angels. These are not the new 
heavens and the new earth. 

That the Divine Laws are fixed, sure, and 
lasting, is five times emphasized by " It was 
so." The law that Like shall bring forth Like 
is laid down ten times. Its tenfold repetition 
rel)ukes the timid, misjudging irreverence of 
apologists for the Word of God, who say it 
teaches no science. The ruler of the darkness 
of this world now drives his serfs to a tiresome. 



The First Words From God. 89 

bootless hunt for evidence to disprove that oft- 
repeated, clear, precise, unchanging law. No 
snch evidence is found. Such evidence never 
v^ill be found. Common sense and reason know 
that what is not in a thing cannot come out of a 
thing — that man's accountable, immortal soul 
cannot come out of the mind of a baboon ! 



90 The First Words From God. 



CHAPTER XX. 

In the unveiling of the Creative Works " the 
single eye " at once beholds, the " open " heart 
at once feels, divine wisdom, and yet it may be 
well to try to discover some of the lesser and 
less apparent marks of that wisdom — signs of 
what the Hebrews called the finger of God. 

A father, telling his little boy of the fishes of 
the sea, may have leviathans of the deep in 
mind ; to the boy they may seem only a little 
bigger than the minnows of the brook he pad- 
dles in with naked feet ; but though he cannot 
sound the depths or compass the breadth of his 
father's words, he catches something of his 
father's thought. In verses twenty, twenty-one, 
and twenty-two the swarming of fishes is plain ; 
but in " God created great whales " — where the 
word translated whales is misleading and insuffi- 
cient — a depth of meaning is opened by the dis- 
covery that in an age, before the age of man, 
there were sea monsters whose fossil remains 
now make known their wonderful size and ter- 
riflc power. That almost seemingly casual allu- 



The First Words From God. 91 

si on to such dragons of the deep suggests that 
the opening chapters of the Bible are " ahead of 
science." 

In tlie withholding of the formula "It was 
good " from the work of the Second Day, 
there may also be confirmation of that fine 
thought; for in the long course of that Day 
the coal now dug u]3 to warm houses and drive 
ships was condensed from foul gases and hard- 
ened by most noisome processes, until the 
poisoned envelope of the earth was so medicined 
that plants could live in the clear air. 

There may be another illustration of that 
good saying in the fifth and sixth verses of chap- 
ter second. In contrast with the age of man, 
of which new things are about to be told, there 
is said to have been a time when Rain had not 
fertilized the ground. In this there may be an 
allusion to a Eain greater than the rain in the 
days of Noah. For the earth was once a self- 
Inminous ball of fire. It cooled by the radia- 
tion of its heat until a crust, enwrapped in fiery 
vapor, formed around it. The cooling vapor 
became a " mist watering the earth ; " and, as 
now, when suddenly cloud-mist is poured forth 
in rain, the vapor which bathed the earth was 



92 The First Words From God. 

condensed by cooling into torrents of rain that 
fertilized the ground, furrowed the crust of the 
nascent globe, cut out the channels of rivers, 
shaped continents and gathered into seas. Only 
in this century has this been known ; and here 
Revelation is "ahead of science," if it made 
even a passing allusion to that epoch-making 
Eain. 

When an old man calls to mind his father's 
words their vrisdom is lit up by his whole life ; 
and so light is thrown upon the first words from 
our Heavenly Father by all later Scripture. 
When we read, " God said. Let us make man," 
or read of the brooding of the Spirit, in the 
light of " In the beginning was the Word, and 
the Word was with God, and the Word was 
God, all things were made by Him ;" and of the 
command to baptize in the name of the Father, 
and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, then 
the opening of the Bible plainly reveals a mys- 
terious, threefold Personality in the Godhead. 

In like manner light is thrown on the making 
of man " out of the dust of the ground^^ by the 
twenty-sixth verse of the eighth chapter of Prov- 
erbs, where it is revealed that "the earth, the 
fields, and the highest part^^ — that is, the elemen- 



The First Words From God. 93 

tary particles or beginnings " of the dust of the 
wovld^^ were created before man was made. 
From this it is to be inferred, that in Genesis ii, Y, 
where man is said to be formed of the dust of 
the ground, something is meant quite unlike 
what the word dust usually means, and that is 
made certain by the foui-teenth, fifteenth, and 
sixteenth verses of the 139th Psalm : ^^ I am 
fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful 
are Thy works ; and that my soul knoweth right 
well. My substance was not hidden from Thee, 
when I was made in secret, curiously wrought 
in the lowest" (that is, the earliest) "parts of 
the earth. Thine eyes did see my imperfect 
substance, and in Thy book were all my mem- 
bers written, which in continuance" (literally, 
'^ day hy day^'^ that is, in the Creative Days) 
" were fashioned, when as yet there was none of 
them." Men of science, who think the frame of 
man is related to earlier living forms, may well 
be struck with awx on seeing what this ancient 
Scripture suggests. If they gave to the Bible 
as honest, earnest study as they give to Nature, 
they would gladly confess that, " search as far 
and wide as we can, find out as much of truth as 
we may, when we look back to the Scripture it 



94 The First Words From God. 

seems to look out serenely upon us with a 
supreme intelligence that knows all our know- 
ing." ^ 

St. Peter, in his Second General Epistle, 
when revealing that the earth, and man's works 
therein, will be " burned up," confirms by a 
single word the recent scientific idea of the in- 
destructibility of matter. The fashion of tliis 
earth will be destroyed by fire, but the elements 
of which the earth is comj)osed will not be 
destroyed — they will " melt " with fervent 
lieat. 

Chemistry has the sanction of Holy Scripture. 
That science applies weight and measure to ma- 
terial things, and in these, analysis finds the 
source and sum of all that this science accom- 
plishes ; and the prophets dwell with adoring 
reverence on the fact that the Creator made all 
things by weight and measure. 

Astronomy lives, and moves, and has her 
being, in her belief in the unity of nature. 
Much of the superiority of the science of 
Christendom to the science of the ancient and 
the heathen worlds is due to that belief. Of 

* '* The Star of our Lord," 210. 



The First Words From God. 95 

that unity it is ever finding more and more evi- 
dence, yet as it can never survey the whole field 
of being it can never prove it. Only in the 
Word of God, which is the original and chief 
source of that firm belief, is there Proof oi the 
unity of the universe — proof that order and law 
rule in all that exists in birth and change. 



96 The First Words From God. 



CHAPTER XXL 

I. Immediately after it is revealed that in the 
beginning God created all things, the successive 
stages in the fitting up of a home for man are 
made known. With this belongs what is said of 
the Rest of God on the Seventh Day — a Rest 
from His creative works in this world. Tlie 
upholding of His power and the inbreathing of 
His mercy and grace into this world still con- 
tinue, and the putting forth of His creative 
energy, elsewhere in the universe, does not 
cease, for our Lord said, "My Father worketh 
hitherto." 

n. On Mount Sinai the divine command that 
for a seventh part of his time man shall rest 
from the labors and cares of his perishable state, 
and devote the Sabbath to the imperishable life 
to come, was enforced by God's example of 
resting on the Seventh Day ; and Israel was 
then told to " Remeniber the Sabbath," which 
implies a previous knowledge of the Sabbath 
handed down, it may be, from the Days before 
the Flood. 



The First Words From God. 97 

When God finished the making of man's 
world he made the Sabbath a day of rest. In 
this there shines out His loving-kindness, to re- 
veal wliich is the great end and aim of the First 
Word from on High. For man's sake, the gra- 
cious forethought of man's Creator sanctified the 
Sabbath from the foundation of the world ; and 
the reasonless assertion, that this revelation of 
His grace is merely a late editorial interpolation, 
robs us of a touching evidence of our Creator's 
forethought for our good. 

HI. The sun, moon, and stars are for "signs." 
Scripture here foretells that office work of the 
lights in the heavens, by means of which tlie 
bark of Yasco De Gama rounded the Cape of 
Storms, and the caravels of Columbus found 
their way to the New World. It foretells the 
guiding over the deep below by signs in the 
deep above, without which the trackless ocean 
had never been the highway of nations, and the 
divine purpose to make this world the Home of 
the whole Family of Man would have failed in 
part. 

TV. The fourth and fifth verses of chapter 
second anticipate the wisdom of Plato by thou- 
sands of years, and they go far beyond his wis- 
7 



98 The First Woeds From God. 

dom. Connecting and coupling greatest and 
smallest things, the making of the universe and 
the making of plants — iov "the Lord God 
made the earth and the heavens, and every plant 
of the field before it was in the earth, and every 
plant of the field before it grew " — those verses 
reveal that all things were created in Eternity 
before tliey w^ere ]nade objects of sight and 
touch in time ; the actual making of each thing 
so according with its Divine Ideal, that each 
created thing is good, and the whole Creation is 
" very good." 

This same truth, revealed at the opening of 
that Revelation by the words, " In the begin- 
ning " — in eternity — " God created the Heavens 
and the Earth," is in the summing up of what 
was told before of the creation. In a passing 
allusion to this truth some explanation of it was 
promised and will now be given in a few words. 
For even to those, to whom this truth is new and 
strange, it may readily be cleared up by a ques- 
tion easily answered, and to which there can be 
only one answer. When Yelasquez, Titian, 
Rubens, or Vandyke were determining upon 
what a picture should mean, on what to put in 
and what to leave out, on its figures, their fea- 



The Fikst Words From God. 99 

tures, their attitudes, was not that as truly the 
creation of the pictures as when, with palette 
and paint, they put on canvas an outward, actual, 
visible image of what before was in existence 
in their own minds ? 



100 The First Words From God. 



CHAPTER XXIL 

In the generation of the lowest plant there is 
a secret that baffles the microscope and defies 
the chemist. It will not give itself up. There 
is no possibility that science will ever reach the 
origin of Things. That is out of, away from, 
and above the fields of science or of philosophy. 
What creation is in itself h unrevealed, is perhaps 
iinrevealable. Yet, in that word from God which 
begins His Bible we have found Force originat- 
ing, as it can only originate, from Spirit. We 
have found the making, out of Infinite "form- 
less " force, of that which has form, has visibility 
and weight, has an identity which constitutes it 
a thing distinct from each and every other thing. 
We have found the element, Light — in finding 
which we find motion, which belongs not to 
matter ; and we have found Life, whose secret 
eludes the grasp of physical and of metaphysical 
science. In finding all this — and other truths 
besides — we have found what anticipates the 
best accredited science, so far as its thoughts 
can fix upon anything concerning the first form 



The First Words From God. 101 

of things; and it goes far beyond all human 
thought, for man can only repeat that God cre- 
ated the Heavens and the Earth, And there is, 
and ever will be, the incomprehensible presence 
of the Infinite Spirit in everything that is made, 
upholding its selfhood. And there is another 
problem which our reason cannot solve, to be 
named hereafter. 

I close with farther thoughts on what is told 
in the Bible of the element Light, (in part 
recalling some things said before,) and on what 
is told of Darkness — of that darlcness on the 
face of the waters of Infinity. 

First The element Light stands apart. Its 
origin is not that of the other elements. The 
generating of the latter began when the spirit 
hrooded on the Waters. 

The fourth verse of 2 Corinthians vi, reveals 
that the Light was commanded to shine ottt of 
the darhness. 

Second, Whatever their cause and whatever 
their open or hidden differences, heat, light, 
electricity and other forces are, in their effects? 
the appearings of what essentially is one and 
the same Element ; and to name but one of its 
phases : in every house there is enough of unseen 



102 The First Words From God. 

electricity to blow the house to atoms if concen^ 
trated in one lightning-like flash, and were all 
the electricity in a house to be at once with- 
drawn its inmates would suddenly die. But we 
are not here considering the appearings of the 
element Light, (of which electricity is only one,) 
but its universality. Where Life is, that ele- 
ment is. It is everywhere present. To this 
marvelous, all-pervading element, unlike any 
other, God gave the name of the most common 
of all its manifold appearings and effects when, 
calling it forth out of the davTcness^ He said, 
" Let there be Light ! " 

Third. In the main. Light has been thought 
of merely as something to see hy^ and for the 
most part has been attributed to the sun. There- 
fore the revealed fact, tliat there was light before 
the sun became a daylight-giving orb, has been 
perplexing. It waxed the more so, when the 
geologists proved that the periods of the earth's 
making lasted for thousands on thousands of 
years ; for according to the Holy Scripture there 
was light from the birth of time, light for ages 
and ages before there were eyes to see by it or 
plants to drink it in ; and while Christians felt 
as Longinus did, that tlie words, " God said, Let 



The First Words From God. 103 

there be Light : and there was Light," were sub- 
lime, some were ahnost sorry they were ever 
said. The difficulty ends when we understand 
that at the birth of time our Lord called forth 
the element Light from out of the darkness; 
for though nothing is told of what wxre then its 
appearings and effects, it is enough for us to 
know that it was a first principle in the being of 
the Universe, in the making of all the tljings 
that were made, and was present in all our world 
from the instant of its generation.'^ 

Fourth. Scientists are teaching tliat ''^ Light 
is a mode of motion P This cloaks Ignorance 
with a word, as in the case of the word Gravi- 
tation. It is merely the putting forth of a name 
as an expla/nation. In that word men of science 
no more find the secret of Light than unscientific 
men find it in the Universal effects of its indis- 
pensable presence and power in nature and life. 
There cannot be motion without force, and what 



* This was written thirty years ago. In the meantime, or 
rather in the latter part of that time, scientists have proved 
that what skeptics once so confidently assumed to be error as 
to Light in the Sacred Oracle was the truth. Yet what was 
written so long since keeps its place here for the sake of its 
bearing on an instructive fact in the history of the assaults 
made upon the first of Genesis ; and because what is revealed 
of light goes far back of what science has at last discovered. 



104 The First Words From God. 

is that force, that omnipresent force which 
everywhere gives motion? How does it origi- 
nate ? Who gives that force its many properties 
and powers, its myriads of millions of effects in 
the heavens and the earth ? Who guides them ? 
Who controls them ? 

FiftJi, What ancient sages beheld or divined 
of the extent of the potencies and effects of the 
element Light in the ether, the air, the earth, in 
plants, in animals, in man, was essentially as far- 
reaching as w^hat modern scientists have dis- 
covered of its wide and varied appearings on- 
ward to, and beyond, magnetism. Each has shown 
the great heights to which the inquiry of man 
may attain ; and yet all that man has ever wisely 
conjectured, and all that he will ever find out as 
to that Element, comes far short of what God 
has revealed. Into its secret chamber man will 
never enter. For it is written, that " the Lord 
answered Job out of the whirlwind and said, 
Where wast thou when I laid the foundations 
of the earth ? Canst thou bind the sweet influ- 
ence of the Pleiades, or loose the bands of 
Orion ? Have the gates of death been opened 
unto thee ? " With such high words the follow- 
ing challenge belongs, — "Where is the way where 



The First Words From God. 105 

Light dwelleth ? " Those words in one of the an- 
cient books of Holy Scripture are in unison with 
these words in one of its latest books, — " God 
who quickeneth all things, the King of Kings and 
Lord of Lords, who only hath immortality, dwell- 
ing in the Light which no man can a^pjproach 
unto^ whom no man hath seen or can see, to Him 
be honor and power everlasting." These words 
carry us far back to the lOith Psahn : — " Bless 
the Lord, O my Soul ! O Lord my God, Thou 
art very great, who coveredst thyself with Light 
as with a garment^ No thoughts of sunlight 
fulfill those words of Holy Scripture. Is it said, 
" That is figurative language ? " Behind the fig- 
ure there is a fact. There Light is the symbol 
of some ineffable reality. And those Scriptures 
were prepared for, when, calling forth from the 
darkness the element essential to all life, God in 
His first creating word, naming it from its 
most common, most familiar manifestation, said, 
" Let there be Light." 

Holy Scripture lights up the correspondence 
between the worlds of nature and of spirit, for 
both worlds are from the Lord. Nowhere else 
is that correspondence more helpful to the soul 
than in the element Light. Tlmt element per- 



106 The First Words From God. 

vades all things. It is never apart from life. 
Wherefore it is a symbol (too little as yet com- 
prehended) of the Eternal Word made flesh,* of 
Christ, '' the true Light which lighteneth every 
man that cometh into the world." 

Sixth. Even outside of the illuminated circle of 
Hebraic wisdom, in heathen Cosmologic TJiought, 
an awe-inspiring idea of the ante-primeval Dark- 
ness was a reminiscence of the oldest Word from 
on High ; and that, with many of the ancient na- 
tions, the day began not with the daybreak, but 
with the darkness of the preceding night, may be 
accounted for in lilvc manner. To some ancient 
sages Darkness w^as far from being the mere 
absence of Light. It was the mother of Light- 
In the Cosmologic poem of Hesiod, philosopher 
and poet, there is sometliing of the idea of 
Darkness given to the Hebrews in their Holy 
Scriptures. Hesiod said : — 

'* From night was born Ether and Day." 

And the ante-primeval Darkness made an im- 
pression on minds of old resembling that now 
made on us by the solemn religious night, w^hen 

* Whose glory the Apostles beheld. (See St. John i, 14.) 



The First Words From God. 107 

it hides all within itself, and we feel that in the 
dark God is very nigh. 

Later Scripture also told the Hebrews what 
they learned of Darkness from the earliest sacred 
oracle. There the divine challenge as to light 
is stronger than as to darkness : — " Where is the 
way where Light dwelleth ? " With those words 
the prophet Daniel is in harmony : — " God know^- 
eth what is in the Darkness," " the Light also 
dwelleth with Thee." And God Himself said, 
" I form the Light and create Darkness. I the 
Lord do all things."*^ 

Darkness was the symbol of God's presence in 
the cloud on Sinai and in the cloud on the mercy 
seat. "All the men of Israel assembled them- 
selves unto King Solomon, and it came to pass 
that the cloud filled the house of the Lord so 
that the priests could not stand to minister be- 
cause of the cloud, for the glory of the Lord 
had filled the house of tlie Lord; then spake 
Solomon, The Lord said He would divell in 
the tliick darkness^ (See 1 Kings viii.) 

The element Light — l)orn of the Darkness — 



* Said to Cyrus, the Persian, "those words go to prove that 
Cosmologic Truths resembling those of Scripture were known 
outside of the bounds of the chosen people." 



108 The First Words From God. 

the first principle in the Life of the Universe, 
is a symbol of the manifest glory of God. The 
Darkness — of which the Light is born, of all 
symbols the most mysterious and most religious 
— is the symbol of an unrevealed, ineffable real- 
ity in the Being of God. And yet, is it not 
conceivable that the Darkness, before Time was, 
may have been Light, which to mortals would 
liave been darkness, an insufferable, annihilating 
brightness ? For " none may see God and live." 
(Exodus xxxiii, 20.) May it not be possible thus 
to harmonize to Him the opposite ascriptions of 
darkness and light ? " God dwelleth in Light," 
yet " He is the King (aSpara) invisible J^ (1 Tim- 
othy vi, 16, and i, 17.) "^o man hath seen God at 
any time ; " yet '^ the only begotten Son who is in 
the bosom of the Father He hath revealed Him." 
" Who by searching can find out God ? Who 
can know the Almighty to perfection ? " After 
the Light was parted from the Darkness how 
could the DarTtness have been as it was before ? 
With tlie birth of Time, with the creation of 
things each having its own selfhood, tliere is that 
which is not God who before was All. Here 
there are depths that cannot be fathomed ! Here, 
too, reason is reasonless. The bounds of Thought 



The First Words From GoDc 109 

are reached — -" the flaming hounds of place and 
timeJ'^ 

Finally. I have no doubt of some of the ideas 
which the Hebrews received from tlieir Scrip- 
tures as to the element Light. They knew of its 
all-prevailing, indispensable presence and of its 
oftice in the generation of every living thing. 
But I know not what idea the Hebrew sages had 
of the change when God is said to have called or 
named the darkness — night. What tliat naming 
meant to them is hidden. The word I see. The 
spirit in the word is veiled. I cannot discern 
the form thereof. 

And to the full interpretation of the first and 
second chapters of Genesis other questions be- 
long, not here to be touched upon : — such as the 
questions as to human creatures before the Lord 
God breathed into the Adam the breath of lives 
and the True Human Race began, and as to the 
Creation of Woman and the site of Paradise. 

St. Peter said that in the truth revealed by St. 
Paul there were things hard to understand ; and 
in our own lives there is much which it is hard 
to understand. At one time or other each one 
of us has need to recall to his heart the words — 
"Be still ; and Tcnow that I am GodP 



110 The First Words From God. 

There are tilings in Life and in Nature that we 
do not and cannot understand. Such there are 
in tlie Bible. On them liglit will shine, even 
though not in our day. To some there seems to 
be darkness in the Bible which is not there, but 
is in their own hearts. The Pharisees were told 
that if they would not believe Moses, they would 
not believe one who should rise from the dead. 
The One, with the promise of whose coming the 
Word of God begins, did rise from the dead ; 
and now there are Pharisees who dare to say 
they believe in Him, yet despise His attestation 
to Moses. Man is what he hath ever been ; and 
still the Word of God abides, and will abide, 
when these heavens and this earth have passed 
away! 

To bring out the truth in the Bible is a true 
way to defend the Bible. That, for many years, 
I have tried to do ; and for those who, at any 
time in any way, have granted me their sympathy 
or help, I give thanks unto God and pray for 
them and theirs to the latest generation. And 
to all who revere the Book of God, to whom my 
words may come, I would say that now it is of 
great moment to bring out the truth — so far as 
it can yet be done — in the first two chapters of 



The First Words From God. Ill 

that Bookj whether we look at common yet 
heathenish errors as to some things therein, or 
to the bitter and persistent (so-called) scientific, 
historical, and critical assaults upon them, or to 
their own Divine Wisdom. For these solemn 
words of Tayler Lewis, as to the far-reaching evil 
of unbelief in the First Words from on High, are 
more timely now than fifty years ago, and are 
forever true : 

"The Revelation of the origin of the earth 
and man has difficulties in itself, it has also been 
surrounded by others from without that are 
pressing more and more closely for a solution. 
The chasm of doubt is opening wider and wider. 
It must be closed, and by material from the 
Scriptural side. The great question, the mo- 
mentous question involving nothing less than 
the degree of hearty credence to be given to the 
very first page of God's written revelation must 
he settled from the Bible side^ or there comes in 
a flood of unbelief in all Scripture too fearful to 
contemplate. We say all Scripture^ for really 
there is no other place after this where any hold- 
ing barrier can be erected. At any point lower 
down the torrent comes rushing on with the 
accumulated force of all that has given way 



112 The First Words From God. 

before. Creation gone, its place in Scripture 
left a blank, or what is worse a lying myth, who 
will give credence to the account of the Flood, 
or regard the succeeding events in any other 
than their loosest legendary aspects ? The Patri- 
archs become dim mythological shadows, the 
God of the Patriarchs a patrial Deity, to rank 
hereafter with Baal or Thor or Jupiter. Sinai 
can never wholly lose its grandeur, but it is the 
grandeur of a gloomy and terrible myth. Moses 
vanishes through the Ivory Gate, and Prophets 
follow him to the land of lying dreams. And so 
of Him of whom Moses and the Prophets wrote. 
The historical Jesus departs with the rest of the 
long ghostly procession. All is gone but the 
babble of the ideal Christ, and how long would 
that poor shadow linger in the rapidly deepen- 
ing twilight that must follow the real setting 
sun I " 



APPENDIX I. 

The unending, tiresome discussion as to the 
meaning and use of tlie word Day in the first 
cliapters of Genesis seems needless and strange 
as soon as we mark how the word day (or some 
word answering to it) is everywliere used, 
and when we understand the reason for that 
natural common usage.*^ A day is a cycle, a 
period, a bounded time. In its idea cyclicity is 
an invariable element. Its time is a variable 
element. And, whatever the length of any time 
cycle, it is a day as truly as a circle is a circle, 
whatever the breadth of its diameter — a barley- 
corn, a foot, a mile, or the diameter of the 
globe. 

If a man says, "It is as cold as a day at the 
Pole, I will wait for a day or two, I shall not go 
to-day," he uses the word day for three cycles of 
d liferent lengths : for six months, for twenty- 
four hours, for twelve hours. Each of those 



*Its reason is admirably set forth by Dr. Tayler Lewis in 
the luminous chapter, on "Phenomenal Language," in ** The 
Six Days of Creation." 
8 



114 Appendix I. 

three cycles is a day as truly as the last. And 
so, each time-cycle in the world's generation was 
a day — not figuratively^ but in the proper, uni- 
form sense of the term. And in the fourth verse 
of chapter second, tlie whole of the cycle of the 
world's making is called a Day, and not figura- 
tively^ for it was a day. 

When it is argued that had the Voice from 
God meant to reveal that the Times in the crea- 
tion were long, they would have been called 
cycles, periods, or ages, it is almost enough to 
reply that Moses recorded what was said in a lan- 
guage that may have had only the word day for 
all periods of time ; and that there are the same 
radical elements in the word day as in the words 
cycle^ period^ or age^ words not then coined. 

If it be farther argued, that had even so con- 
densed a revelation meant to give the idea that 
tlie cycles of creation were long it would have 
used epithets so describing them — surely would, 
for they lasted for thousands of j^ears— the reply 
is, It comes out plainly, forcibly, and naturally, 
and could that term be properly used here, it 
might be said it comes out philosophically, 
that the times of creation were not our days. It 
comes out in their description. Three of the six 



Appendix I. 115 

days were not sun-measured. The continuance of 
the seventh shows that the length of the others was 
not that of our days. The use and meaning of 
the phrase " evening was, moriiing was " prove 
that they were jpeculiar days. These things, 
together with the great works done in those 
times, make it clear that those days were of in- 
definite and vast duration. 

Still, there is the difficult fact of the long con- 
tinued belief that the world Avas made in a week. 
But when to those heathen, from whom came 
the kingdoms of Europe, the Church taught the 
great truth that one God made all things, she 
gave them the idea not of the time, but of the 
power of His great w^orks, as it is given in the 
words ''He sjyake^ and it was done j lie com- 
manded^ and it stood fastP Those worshipers 
of strange gods and of the forces of nature did not 
learn all there is in the earliest revelation, yet it 
rescued from idolatry. By it they were taught 
that matter is not eternal^ and at the very time 
when the idea of its eternity was creeping into 
Jewish schools of learning and there playing 
somewhat of the part which the dogma of evo- 
lution is playing now. But the subject is a large 
one; and here it can only be said that it was 



116 Appendix I. 

largely the belittling of the heathenism, from 
which we began to emerge only a few hun- 
dred years ago, which long made us so content 
with thinking that the great days of the great 
works of God were as little as the days of man. 
And here the question is, What did the An- 
cients think of the length of the times of ereor 
tion ? The Cosmologies of the heretical nations 
kept some reminiscences of the divine revelation 
recorded in Genesis ; and they do not say or sug- 
gest that the times in creation were short. That 
of the Etrurians is of great interest because of 
their distance from Babel and because it is so 
like the revelation that begins the Bible. As to 
the number, order, and work in each of the cycles 
of creation, it is much the same and the time of 
each of its six days is one thousand year$."^ 



* What still exists of the so-called " Etruscan Teaching " is 
now to be found only in the Lexicon of Suidas, which is of the 
tenth century. But he ascribes it to a ** skillful historian " of 
that people. Huidekoper. in his exhaustive treatise ** On the 
Judaism in Rome," holds that the ** Etruscan Teaching" may 
have been a Jewish fabrication in the reign of Claudius (A. D. 
41-54) or "a century earlier." Granting that, it might still 
keep some traces of Etrurian traditions; and certainly it 
would give a Jewish opinion that the Days of Creation were 
long periods. As like periods of a thousand years are named in 
other Cosmologic traditions of unquestionable antictuity— the 
Persian, for instance— the thousand years may perhaps be 
understood as standing for a long time rather than for any 
specific period. 



Appendix I. 117 

And here the question is, What did the He- 
brews think of the length of the times in crea- 
tion ? As to that, let Moses witness in his mag- 
nificent Psalm "^ beginning, " Lord, Thou hast 
been our dwelling place in all generations." 
From us he is so far off, such an ancient man, 
that his looking back to the generations before 
him as if they were a great many is a surprise ; 
yet they did reach back through the Patriarchal 
times and through the Antediluvian Ages. He 
does not stop there in thinking of God's eternity, 
but recalls His w^orks in creation. ^' Before the 
mountains were brought forth, or ever Thou 
hadst formed the earth and the world, even 
from 01am to 01am, from everlasting to ever- 
lasting, Thou art God." In solemn contrast 
comes the thought of the vanity of human life, 
A " thousand years in thy sight are as yesterday 
when it is past, and as a watch in the night. We 
spend our years as a tale that is told." How in- 
congruous, how utterly out of place, how out of 
keeping with the whole train of thought his 
there recalling the days of creation if he thought 

* Some try— with such poor success that it is hardly worth 
while to refer to it— to show that Moses did not write the 104th 
Psalm; but whoever wrote it was an ancient man, and the 
argument from the train of thought abides in all its strength. 



118 Appendix I. 

the length of them all was only one hundred 
and forty- four hours, and of each of tliem only 
twenty- four hours! To any ancient heathen 
sage, with his idea of the generation of the earth, 
the notion that the cycles of the world's making 
were only twenty-four hours long would have 
been absurd ; to any ancient Hebrew sage that 
notion would have been both impious and ab- 
surd. He would have said, as the prophet Micah 
did say, " Those days were days of eternity."' 

"The evening and the morning were one 
Day." Tliis, though often cited to prove the 
days were our days, is not a description of a 
day, as is plainer when it is thus more ex- 
actly rendered — " There was evening, there was 
morning." This formula, coming after each 
Creative Period, refers to Times when there 
were no sun-measured, twenty-four hour days. 

A correct idea of the use of Day in Genesis i, 
as marking the beginning and the bounds of 
eacli Creative work, frees "evening was, morn- 
ing was " from all relation to onr common days ; 
and then naturally and impressively it intimates 
that in each Creative Period things became 
more and more perfect, that in the making of 
our World there was progress from lower to 



Appendix II. 119 

liigher states of being, progress in the material 
Creation which is type and prophecy of progress 
in the spiritual creation world without end. 

APPENDIX II. 

The idea of its Time is as essential to the idea 
of a world as that of its Space. And here let us 
inquire wliether as to Time and Space anything 
is revealed ; for where, if not in what is divinely 
told of the making of our w^orld, may we hope 
to gain any insight into what Time or Space 
may be ? Some philosophers contend that Time 
is a conceit of the human brain ; but it is re- 
vealed that Time w^as, before there was a human 
brain. Unlike Space, Time is a bounded tiling. 
Each of its Cycles, great or small, is a birth, a 
passing on, a passing away, ortiis transitus in- 
teritus / and therefore there can be no rectilin- 
ear, endless progress of things in time. 

In the earliest speech one and the same name 
may have been given to the greatest Cycle, the 
all of Time, and to its lesser Cycle, the com- 
mon day. In the Latin language such a usage 
kept a place. There dies may stand for tem- 
puSj day for time. There, to be born is venire 
in dieiUy to come into Time. And, now, 



120 Appendix II. 

when a man dies, it is a common saying that 
"his time is endedP There is instinctive wis- 
dom in tliis ; for when Heat, one of tlie manifes- 
tations of the element Light, withdraws from a 
man, when his body is cold, his Time is ended. 
Of each and all of the ceaseless activities of the 
element Light, of each and all of the effects of 
its universal presence. Time is not only the meas- 
ure, but Time is, in some way^ so bound up with 
that element that its ow^n existence depends upon 
it, for God called that element Day, and He gave 
that name to Time w^hen He said, Before the day^ 
I am. When the element Light shall withdraw 
from our world, then Time — the Time of our 
w^orld — will be no more ; for as the element Light 
made one day of the Six Time Cycles of the gen- 
eration of our world, so it makes one day of all 
the Cycles of our world, it makes Time itself. 

As to what Space may be, there has been much 
speculation. Unlike Time it is boundless ; and 
some philosophers, unable to grasp it, and so 
unable to tell the world what Space is, deny 
that it is a real thing. Yet, so far from Space 
being unreal, it might almost be said to be more 
real than anything else, for without Space no real 
things could be. And though the soul cannot 



Appendix III. 121 

answer all inquiries as to Space, yet when it 
gives itself up to thinking of Space — as the 
quicker and more piercing souls of children 
often do — then the soul feels that Space is an 
awful thing. We shrink from the thought of it 
with something of alarm. "We can hardly say as 
Sir Isaac Newton did :^ Deus durat semper et 
adest ubique et existendo semper et vhique du- 
rationem et spatittm constituet / yet we feel that 
there must be some special, peculiar relation 
between the Infinite Being and Space. Though 
Space, in our conception of it, be " formless and 
void," we feel deeply that God is there, and the 
rationale of the feeling seems to be that some- 
how, though how we cannot tell^ the existence of 
Space depends upon the Infinite Force every- 
where and ever with and from the Infinite 

Spirit. 

APPEJSDIX III. 

A PART of the argument in this Essay lacks and 
needs the strong confirmation of the marks and 
signs of truths of oldest revelation in the oldest 
stages of Ancient Eeligions. Such marks and 
signs are found in the belief, (though ill-defined,) 

* God abides ever, and IJe is everywhere. Hais, and by exist- 
ing ever and everywhere He constitutes, Time and Space. 



122 Appendix III. 

in one Supreme Being having more names tlian 
one — as now with us He is known as the Al- 
mighty, the Creator, the Infinite ; in tlie beh'ef 
in immortality and a judgment after death, so 
striking in the solemn Egyptian '^BooTc or Rit- 
ual of the Deadj " in the universal right of sacri- 
fice, (though of ill-remembered or forgotten 
origin;) in beHef in a communion with God, 
shown in prayers for His forgiveness of sin and 
deliverance from its po\ver, and in such minor 
facts as the memory of a Golden Age, and the 
widely spread worship of the Tree and the 
Serpent. 

The proposition, that the nearer the heathen 
were to Revelations recorded in Scripture the 
more evangelical was their belief^ might be 
proved by evidence in Eome and in Greece; 
but within the last thirty years its f nil and de- 
cisive evidence has been disinterred from tlie 
early historic records of Assyria, of Egypt, and 
of India. This is a translation of an Assyrian 
tablet given in the XlXth Volume of the " Jour- 
nal of the Victoria Institute : " — 

'* O, my Lord, my sins are many, my trespasses great! 
And the wrath of the gods has plagued me with disease 
And with sickness and sorrow. 



AppEi^Dix III. 123 

I fainted, but no one stretched forth his hand ! 

I groaned, but no one drew nigh ! 

I cried aloud, but no one heard ! 

O Lord, do not abandon thy servant, 

In the waters of the great storm, seize his hand ! 

The sins he has committed turn Thou to righteousness." 

This God is also the Creator : — 

"The God my Creator, may He stand by my side ! 

Keep Thou the door of my lips ! 

Guard Thou my hands, O Lord of light ! " 

The writer of the article, ^' On the Oliaracter- 
istics of Primitive Religions," from which the 
above is taken, rightly says, — ^' With the excep- 
tion of one word, which, after all, requires, 
perhaps, explanation rather than change, these 
prayers might have been offered up yesterday 
by some saint of God in the Christian Church." 

1 also especially refer to the trustworthy vol- 
ume on the Persian Religion, by Dr. Martin 
Haug, whose research among the Parsees and 
historic discoveries of the fact that Zoroaster 
was the title of the Persian Pontiffs, and of the 
time and teaching of Zoroaster Spitama, with 
Kepler's astronomic discovery of the remark- 
able conjunctions of planets which preceded the 
outshining of the new star seen by the Magi, 
made possible my answers to the questions, — 



124 Appendix IY. 

Who were the Wise Men, and how did they come 
to Jerusalem ? 

I refer also to the writings of Sir Monier 
Williams as of high authority on all questions 
as to the ancient Scriptures of India. He says, 
" They begin with much promise amid scintilla- 
tions of truth and light, and occasional sublime 
thoughts from the source of all truth and light, 
but end in sad corruption and lamentable im- 
purities." And there is a fearful unveiling in 
Romans i, 18-25, of that corruption of ancient 
religions which is one of the many striking and 
sad evolutions in the world's strange history ; 
and one of its reasons is given when it is said of 
the apostate nations, — "That which may be 
known of God he showed unto them, and they 
changed the truth of God into a lie." 

APPENDIX IY. 

Hegel's idea of germs of truth in the world's 
religions and of their opening the way for Chris- 
tianity (though in a measure anticipated by St. 
Clement of Alexandria") has a flavor of orioji- 
nality ; Hegel's silence as to any relation between 
Christianity and Indaism is strangely perverse. 
His way of treating the Hebrew Scriptures 



Appendix IV. 125 

originated with Barucli Spinoza, whose writings 
are the source of all the late rationalistic criti- 
cism. Bat here we are to mark only this blas- 
phemy of Hegel and his sycophants, viz. : That 
God comes to consciousness of His own exist- 
ence, in man. 

Dr. Calvin E. Stowe was a greater man than 
Hegel, and his equal in learning. Dr. Stowe 
was not of those scholars from the United States 
who, in Strasburg, Heidelberg, Berlin, or else- 
where, listen to the lectures of Germanic Pro- 
fessors as to superhuman oracles. Dr. Stowe 
said, that " Hegel, among the noblest of men in 
many of the qualities which make up a man, of 
prodigious intellect, a generous heart, a fine 
physical organization, was a monstriim horren- 
dura informe^ cui lumen ademptum ; whatever 
obscurity may rest over some of his speculations, 
their principal bearings on religion are perfectly 
intelligible, and are carried out to their extreme 
consequences with a cool audacity that is almost 
frightful. The great discovery boasted by 
Hegel, the honor of whose development Schell- 
ing in vain tried to dispute, is the absolute iden- 
tity of suhject and object. The subjective is the 
whole, and the objective has no existence except 



126 Appendix IV. 

as the creation of the subjective. Admitting 
tliis. Is God the Creator of man, or is man the 
creator of God ? The latter of course ! A sort 
of blind unconscious natura naturans seems to 
be recognized as constantly working, but this 
never attains to Personality, or consciousness, 
except in the human mind ; in that is the only 
development of God. 

" It is a principle of this philosophy that man 
should worsliip himself, and self- worship such as 
that of the Hegelians was never before wit- 
nessed. Neander justly characterized it as self- 
deification. 

^'' The fool hath said in his heart, There is no 
God.' Scripture also saith, ' The fool is wiser 
in his own conceit than seven men who can ren- 
der a reason.' How wonderfully descriptive of 
the foolishness of Hegelian pantheistic atheism ! 

"It is such philosophers as those who presume 
to dictate out of the depths of their own con- 
sciousness as to what is spurious and what is 
genuine in the Bible. Yet their writings are 
translated, are widely read, and in various w^ays 
they have a ruinous influence in our intellectual 
atmosphere, that spares not the theological school, 
the ministerial study, or the Christian pulpit." 



Appendix IV. 127 

Of that last sentence there is now a sickening 
veriiication in the combined eflEorts in Great 
Britain of men, of some note as Biblical Profess- 
ors, to breathe new life into Hegelianism which 
is now moribund in Germany. Dr. Bruce says 
that Hegelianism " is still in vogue, if not in the 
Vaterland, at least in certain British seats of 
learning. Many among us believe in it as a system 
capable of doing service to Christian faith." Dr. 
Fairbairn finds in it ''elements of profoundest 
truth and insiglit." Dr. Oaird, in his " Philosophy 
of Keligion," holds that " God is the organic 
wliole of all existence." It is confessed by Dr. 
Shedd, of the New York Union Theological 
Seminary, that Dr. Caird "adopts the monism 
of Hegel, regards the Deity as a part of a 
general sj^stem, makes God and the universe 
one;" but not sympathizing witli Dr. Stowe's 
righteous, indignant denunciation of blasphemy, 
which heathen Greece or Eome would have 
spurned. Dr. Shedd mildly treats it "as an 
objectionable point in a volume of which the 
excellencies are many." 

The contrast of tlie course of those men with 
that of two men of genius is instructive. Hein- 
rich Heine, day by day, for eight years, was 



128 Appendix IV. 

dying ; yet his friends— one of whom was the 
great physician to whom this essay is dedicated, 
and whose genial face Heine welcomed in poetic 
phrase as " a ray of the sun "—found his wit 
keen, his imagination brilh'ant, and his mind 
clear. With tlie poems that Heine wrote on 
his deathbed, he gave to the world a character- 
istic confession. Hegel had magnetized Heine 
for a time ; and lie says, " I accepted his doctrine 
without demanding any proof, since its conse- 
quences flattered my vanity. I was young, and 
it pleased my vain glory when I learned from 
Hegel that the true God was not as my gi-and- 
mother believed, the God who lives in heaven, 
but myself here on earth. Now, to the great 
displeasure of my enlightened friends, who re- 
proach me with my relapse into the old super- 
stition, as they are pleased to call my return to 
God, I confess without torture, that I have made 
my peace with my Creator. I have really re- 
turned to God, like the prodigal son, after feeding 
swine with the Hegelians for many yearsP 

Burns, the song writer of the English-speak- 
ing race, and Heine, of the German world, were 
quick to receive impressions, yet they had the 
common sense that is the safeguard of genius. 



Appendix V. 129 

With the sophistries of Spinoza, tlie great-great- 
grandfather of Hegel, Burns was fascinated for a 
time. "Strong pride of reasoning," he says, 
"with a little affectation of singularity may mis- 
lead. In the pride of despising old women's 
fables I ventured in the daring path Sj^inoza 
trod J but experience of the weakness, not the 
strength of human powers, made me glad to 
grasp at revealed religion." 

With men proud of heart and professing to 
" have found out the Almighty to perfection," 
it was in the Vedas an early, as it is now a late, 
word of folly and sin that God's creation is God 
Himself ; and it is awe-inspiring when this per- 
sistent folly and sin are rebuked by the First 
Words from on High. 

APPENDIX y. EX NIIIILO NIHIL. 

Sir Monier Williams tells us, — " That almost 

all the learned Brahmans in India say that the 

Veda inculcates spiritual Pantheism : — as in the 

well-known hymn : — 

*^ * In the beginning there was neither aught nor naught. 
Then there was neither sky nor atmosphere above. 
What then enshrouded all this teeming universe ? 
Only the existent One breathed calmly, self-sustained. 
Naught else there was, naught else beyond, above.' 
9 



130 Appendix Y. 

" They say, that there is only one really exist- 
ing essence — only one Being without a second. 
A favorite dogma with all Pantheists i^^'Ex nihilo 
nihil fit^ (nothing is produced out of nothing,) 
in Sanskrit, How can something be produced out 
of nothing? the world and all therein is an 
illusion ; for if there be a Supreme Being He 
cannot create out of nothing ; out of Himself 
He evolves all, and He is all. Many centuries 
before these ideas were ever heard of in Europe 
they were current in India, and are there found 
to be compatible with grossest doctrines and 
practices." 

"With us. Pantheism is now breathing with 
persuasive force in poetry and in all the forms of 
literature : — as in the writings of Ralph Waldo 
Emerson, who says, that " God is the only sub- 
stance, and His msthod is illusion}'^ Pantheism 
has an insidious fascination when it shrouds its 
impiety in delusive, pietistic guise. At first, 
covert and seemingly pure-faced, at last, it dis- 
closes its evil character by openly and boldly 
declaring that there is no ground for distinction 
between right and wrong, virtue and vice ; for 
if in the Pantheistic sense God be all and in all, 
there is no sin. The multitude, to whom even 



Appendix V. 131 

the word Pantheism is unknown, is reached by 
its evil influence. This appears when the aphor- 
ism that whatever is natural^ is right^ is an 
excuse or justification of vice. In that com- 
mon saying, as thus used, the conscience and 
the moral sensibilities are not taken into ac- 
count ; they are left out, and it includes only 
sensual desires and passions. 

But this large subject cannot be considered 
here ; and these few suggestions and hints will 
suffice to bring home to reflective Christian 
hearts the value and the need of the solution 
that has been given of the Pantheistic problem 
which arises with, and gains power from, a mis- 
use of the dogma, De nihilo nihil. 



THE END. 



THE 



HARMONIZING OF THE FOUR RECORDS 



OF THE 



RESURRECTION MORNING, 



THE HARMONIZING OF THE FOUR RECORDS 



OF THE 



RESURRECTION MORNING, 

BY FKANCIS W. UPHAM, LL.D. 



" The seeming differences in the Holy Gos- 
pels, as to the appearings of Christ Jesus after 
His death on the Cross, all cluster around His 
tomb. They can be reconciled by the facts that 
distinct and separate companies of women came 
to the Holy Sepulcher, some earlier, some later ; 
and that each of the Four Evangelists records a 
visit different from that recorded by the others 
in time, in persons, and in what was seen and 
heard." ( " St. Matthew's Witness," page 408.) 

This paragraph was to have been the text of 
an Appendix to that volume ; but death came 
nigh and I had to put off giving the well- 
deserved credit of establishing those facts to the 
late William Sewell. Some forty years ago 
papers of his in the British Critic^ an organ 
of the Oxford Tractarians, were published in a 



4 Harmonizing op the Four Kecords. 

little book as "An Introduction to Plato." 
From 1836 to 1841 he was Professor of Moral 
Pliilosopliy at Oxford, but his translations from 
Greek and Latin showed that the bent of his 
mind was toward classic study. The special 
form this took was seen in " Horse Philologicse," 
'* a research into the exact and delicate meanings 
of Greek tenses, moods, cases, prepositions, and 
other particles." Among his manuscripts at the 
time of his death there were four volumes 
" treating of nice distinctions in the meaning of 
Greek words that seem to be similar in sense and 
are commonly translated in the same way." Also 
a manuscript in three volumes, to which he gave 
the quaint title of " The Microscope of the New 
Testament." From these volumes a selection 
has been published.^ Its purpose is to prove 
that, "in the original language of the Greek 
Testament every word is full of meaning, full of 
teaching, full of divine truth; that the gram- 
matical, careful study of the original must ever 
deepen the conviction, and will consolidate the 
belief that the Scriptures of the New Testament 



* " The Microscope of the New Testament." By the late Rev. 
William Sewell, D.D. Edited by Rev. W. I. Crichton. M.A. 
Rivingtons, 1878. 



Hakmonizing of the Four Records. 5 

bear the impress of, and have been inspired by, 
the Holy Spirit of God." 

Dr. Sewell said : " The various accounts of 
appearances to the women at the tomb on the 
morning of our Blessed Lord's resurrection, ex- 
amined grammatically as they appear in the 
original text, will be found to exhibit the most 
marvelous instance, perhaps, in the whole volume 
of Scripture of minute coincidence, of concordant 
testimony, of undesigned harmony." Of his 
evidence of that, I am to draw an outline, after 
stating some facts that have brought home to 
my heart the great need, at this time, of what he 
proved. 

" The Wise Men," which treats of " Whence 
and How the Magi Came to Jerusalem," was 
given to a minister in high repute as a biblical 
scholar. For a year the little book was unread. 
So passed another year ; a third also ; and then 
the reason flashed out when my friend asked 
abruptly "if I could clear up the records of 
Easter morning." He cared nothing for the 
clearing up of the Magian Pilgrimage, think- 
ing there were other difficulties in the Gospels 
not cleared up, and that the difficulties as to 
Easter morning never could be cleared up. He 



6 Harmonizing of the Four Records. 

was one of that rapidly increasing class of whom 
Bishop Phillips Brooks said : "A large acquaint- 
ance with clerical life has led me to think that 
almost any company of clergymen, gathering 
together and talking freely to each other, will 
express opinions that would greatly surprise the 
congregations who ordinarily listen to those min- 
isters." ^ 

How widely spread, even then, was the pitiable 
unbelief of my learned friend in the full inspira- 
tion of Holy Scripture, was illustrated by a letter 
from an Episcopal clergyman of rare genius and 
quick to feel the pulse of the time, who wrote 
earnestly warning me not to expect that " The 
Wise Men " would have a hearing. SpeaMng in 
the name of the clergy^ he said, ^' We no longer 
take any interest in what is done in our defense ; 
we are all crowding on the walls to see the en- 
gines brought against us for our destruction." 

Long after I had cleared up all other diflBcul- 
ties as to the Holy Gospels, to my own satisfac- 
tion at least, difficulties as to Easter morning 
kept their ground, bat I held to this rule of my 
thinking as to the word of God, not to let my 

* In an article ** On the Pulpit." P}nnceton Beview, 1879. 



Harmonizing of the Four Eecords. 7 

belief in what I know be shaken by what I 
do not know. I had not then questioned the 
common teaching tliat, on Easter morning, only 
one visit of women was made to the Holy Sepul- 
cher. Yet if that was so, holy evangelists di- 
rectly and plainly contradict each other. St. 
John throughout his whole narrative, evidently 
assumes that Mary Magdalene was by herself, 
yet St. Mark, though in agreement with St. John 
when he records that our Lord "first" appeared 
to Mary, says, "when the Sabbath was passed 
Mary Magdalene and the other Mary came unto 
the sejpulcher^ and beheld a young man clothed 
in a long white garment who said unto them, 
" Ye seek Jesus of Nazareth which was crucified. 
He is not here. He is risen. Go tell His dis- 
ciples." How St. Mark's record may be recon- 
ciled with St. John's, and with itself, will be 
shown hereafter. St. Matthew in both versions 
is made to say, "As it began to dawn toward 
the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and 
the other Mary came to the sepulcher." He then 
tells of a great earthquake, and of an angel, 
whose countenance was like lightning, who said, 
" I know that ye seek Jesus which was crucified. 
He is not here. Go quickly and tell His disciples 



8 Harmonizing of the Four Records. 

that He is risen from the dead." Now, if Mary 
beheld those wonders and heard those words and 
ran to the disciples with great joy, how could she 
go to Peter and John — and the like must be said 
of what St. Mark records — and say, " They have 
taken the Lord out of the sepulcher, and we 
know not where they have laid Him? How 
could she say to the supposed keeper of the gar- 
den, " Sir, if thou have borne Him hence, tell 
me where thou hast laid Him, and I will take 
Him away." St. Matthew's first sentence, there 
inaccurately rendered^ is a mistranslation of the 
Greek, which, hereafter, will be corrected and 
the contradiction then be disproved. 

Besides that contradiction, the gospels repeat- 
edly disagree if there was but one visit. In 
one, its time was when it was dark ; in another, 
" at the rising of the sun ; " what the women see, 
what they are told, and what they do, differ ; and 
the angels differ in looks, number, and place, in 
words and in actions. It is strange, then, that 
everyone did not, at once, see that each evangel- 
ist records a different visit ; and, to me, it also 
seems strange that in no religious journal have I 
met with any knowledge that Dr. Sewell had 
done away with the contradiction, reconciled dis- 



Harmonizing of the Four Records. 9 

agreements in the sacred records, and proved 
that on Easter morning, at different times, four 
companies of women visited the Holy Sepulcher. 
That he did by means of his unsurpassed mas- 
tery of the structure and laws of the Greek lan- 
guage, by his reverential study and microscopic 
insight into the meaning of the words of the in- 
spired evangelists. 

Before giving an epitome of his evidence of 
those facts, some things that illustrate and con- 
firm it must here be stated. The Hebrew wom- 
en were not so secluded as the women of most 
of the ancient nations and as in Turkey to-day. 
At an early time this is seen in Deborah, for 
forty years the judge in Israel ; at a later time 
it may be felt in what is said of Anna the 
Prophetess; and the Blessed Virgin's long jour- 
ney to her cousin Elizabeth, shows how freely 
Hebrew women traveled. 

At the sacramental miracles, besides the five 
thousand and the four thousand men, there were 
women and children. Children were brought to 
Jesus for His blessing ; and in the crowd " a 
woman lifted up her voice and blessed Him." 
When the evangelists speak of such things there 
is no evidence that they were relating what was 



10 Harmonizing of the Four Eecords. 

unusual. Many like incidents, of course, were 
passed over ; yet they tell of a woman's com- 
ing behind our Saviour "to touch the hem of 
His garment ; " of the heathen Syro-Phoenician 
woman to whom He said, " Great is thy faith ; " 
of a " sinner " who washed His feet with her 
tears. Even fallen women were not driven 
away by Him. To the great feast that Levi gave 
they came and sat down, and then their Saviour 
said, with pity for them and with indignant 
sarcasm for the angry Pharisees, " I came not to 
call the righteous, but sinners to repentance." 
In the Parables there are " men-servants and maid- 
ens," the woman who lost one of her ten pieces 
of silver, the woman who besought the unjust 
Judge, the virgins who took their lamps and at 
night went out to meet the bridegroom. 

In Galilee many women followed Jesus. Of 
these there were Joanna, wife of Chuza, Herod's 
steward ; Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of 
James the Less, Salome, and also Susanna; the 
last named only once, and then by St. Luke, 
has hardly a place in Christian memory, yet 
she should be remembered forever. Of those 
women, who "ministered of their substance" 
unto Jesus, there were companies led by Joanna, 



Harmonizing of the Four Eecords. 11 

by Mary Magdalene, by the other Mary, and by 
Salome. And as the "many" women, coming 
from villages, towns, and parts of Galilee, natur- 
ally gathered into groups, there may have been 
other companies ; but of their visits to the Holy 
Sepulcher, if such visits there were, nothing is 
told in the gospels, which were not written to 
gratify curiosity. 

In Jerusalem there were women who honored 
our blessed Saviour. Even to Claudia Procula, 
the Roman governor's wife, He was " that just 
man." "When Jesus was led to the Cross "a 
great company of women bewailed and la- 
mented ; " and turning unto them He said, 
" Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for Me, but 
weep for yourselves and for your children." 

Since these things were so, there cannot be a 
doubt that when the Sabbath was past groups of 
women were drawn to the sepulcher. With the 
love in their hearts they could not keep away. 
Angels welcomed and comforted those pious 
mourners; but no angel appeared to the two 
disciples who did not visit the grave of their 
Master and Lord until they heard what Mary 
Magdalene ran to tell them. 

St. John tells of the visit of Mary Magdalene ; 



12 Harmonizing of the Four Records. 

St. Matthew that of the other Mary who came 
next ; St. Luke of Joanna's, the third ; St. Mark 
of Salome's, the last. Each Evangelist tells of a 
visit of which the others say nothing ; yet " in 
each gospel there are indications that the writer, 
while giving his own account of what occurred 
to his own party, had a thorough acquaintance 
with the fact that there were other visits besides 
the one which he related." 

The great obstacle in the way of harmonizing 
the four records has been the direct contradic- 
tion of St. Mark and St. John wlio say that " to 
the tomb Mary Magdalene came first and alone," 
while St. Matthew in the 1st verse of his 28th 
chapter is made to say, in both the received and 
the later version, she came with the other Mary 
— a mistranslation of the Greek, of St. Matthew, 
which is the root of the common error, that but 
one company of women visited the Holy Sepul- 
cher. Dr. Sewell's very important correction of 
that inaccurate rendering will command the assent 
of all who read Greek, and by all others it will 
be readily accepted. " The English came may 
be either singular or plural. Here the Greek is 
riXSev the singular, and not r]Xdov the plural." 
So that in the Greek of St. Matthew two facts 



Harmonizing of the Four Records. 13 

are stated, viz.: that Mary Magdalene and the 
other Mary came, and that they did not come 
together. 

If we keep in mind that the Evangelists take 
for granted a common knowledge of all the 
marvels of Easter morning (known no doubt 
from tlie oral teaching), it will assist us in har- 
monizing their four records. And, here, we 
should consider it certain, that St. Matthew 
meant to leave everything else concerning Mary 
Magdalene to St. John, his colleague in writing 
out the gospel, and to whom Mary ran from the 
tomb. 

In St. Matthew's next words there is also that 
which needs to be explained. There he uses the 
plural^ and the seeming agreement of that plu- 
ral with the previous erroneous rendering has 
confirmed the mistake that the two Mary's were 
•said by him to have come together. Mary Mag- 
dalene may have come to the sepulcher expect- 
ing to meet the other Mary. She did not 
come with her or meet with her ; and we are 
now to show that she did not come absolutely 
alone. That night, in the fortress Antonia, 
Roman sentinels were on their watch as usual. 

From Csesarea the Roman governor had come 
10 



14 Harmonizing of the Four Records. 

up with his guard. Jerusalem was full of sol- 
diers, and full of strangers chafing at the Roman 
yoke, with passion that, at times, broke out 
fiercely, for " Barabbas was cast into prison for 
murder and for a sedition made in the city." 
The turbulent town was not safe for a woman 
to be alone in its streets ; and one of Mary Mag- 
dalene's rank would not have gone to the town 
unattended by her maidens " when it was yet 
dark." Differing as to this from Dr. Sewell, 
from her own words, " We know not," it seems 
to me certain that her maidens were with her, 
though they were considered of so little account 
as to be only indirectly mentioned. For that use 
of the plural by St. Matthew, before spoken of, 
this accounts with the facts also that the other 
Mary had her own maidens with her, and also 
those women of Gahlee of whom she was tlie 
leader. And elsewhere in the sacred records 
there are like uses in like circumstances of the 
plural after the singular. 

Two stones are noted by the evangelists in 
speaking of the sepulcher — its stone door, and a 
stone rolled against it. The latter was a " great 
stone," yet not so great as to block up the en- 
trance to the vault that it could not be entered. 



Harmonizing of the Four Eecords. 15 

It was not thought a suflBcient guard for the 
sepulcher, as is shown by the setting of a watch 
together with the sealing of the stone door of 
the vault — the sealing of anything then, as now, 
in the East was done with especial form and care. 

Tombs, no doubt, were usually thought to be 
sufficiently guarded by their own sanctity and 
by the oriental dread of defilement by contact 
with a dead body; and there are no sufficient 
means of knowing in what other ways the Jews 
tried to make them secure ; yet, " the use of two 
stones has been observed in one of the tombs of 
the kings at Jerusalem. It might be supposed 
that the outer stone at the Holy Sepulcher was 
only a rough, unhewn mass accidently lying on 
the ground and moved against the door by 
levers ; yet the tomb was that of a rich man, 
which might naturally be supposed to contain 
the most perfect appliances for sepulchral archi- 
tecture ; and there is again and again a preci- 
sion in the use of the word roll by three evang- 
elists "—St. Matthew, St. Luke, and St. Mark— 
which would singularly apply to a cylindrical 
stone forming part of tlie original structure. 

When Mary came to the garden, St. John 
seems to say, she entered into the vault. But 



16 Harmonizing of the Four Records. 

Dr. Sewell throws light on — she cometh {eig 
juvrjiJiEiov) into the sepulcher. " John came first 
{eig fiVTjfietov) to the sepulcher yet went not in." 
St. John used the same word for the inclosure 
and for the vault; which is meant is to be in- 
ferred from the context. Dr. Sewell also says, 
"The Greek epxerat (she cometh) expresses an 
unfinished action." 

That Peter and John, when they came to the 
tomb with Mary, were not stopped from enter- 
ing the vault by the Roman sentinels is a diffi- 
culty that, on refiection, passes away. It was 
the unusual, solemn office of these sentinels to 
watch the dead body of a Prophet whose mir- 
acles were known to all and whose crucifixion 
had troubled the city. In their souls there may 
have been pity, mingled with an awe which was 
heightened by the vanishing of the door of the 
vault, and when a woman and two of His sorrow- 
ing disciples came in the dawning light, it was 
not in their hearts to stop them going into the 
vault. They had no fear that they would take 
the body away. 

Here, what happened in the garden after 
Mary fled, will be considered, though it did not 
take place immediately. As St. Matthew tells, 



Harmonizing of the Four Eecords. 17 

an angel descended, rolled back the outer stone, 
and, sitting upon it, said to the company of the 
other Mary, " Come, see the place where the 
Lord lay," which agrees with what elsewhere 
appears in the records, viz. : that the stone door 
had vanished, " He is not here. He was raised 
as He said." " The English version, He is risen, 
is not forcible enough. Here the past tense is 
important. ' Whom the Father raised from tlie 
dead' is repeatedly the language of Scripture, 
and here care should be taken not to overlook the 
passive voice which implies the same doctrine." 

The portent of the open door, from which no 
one was seen to come forth, was not enough to 
drive the Roman sentinels from their post ; but 
the angel, with his face like the lightning, terri- 
fied them ; and when they heard him say, " He 
is not here," they gave up their w^atcli and went 
to make their report. The angel commanded the 
women to leave the garden "quickly," and as they 
ran to the disciples Jesus met them on their way. 

To harmonize these things with what St. John 
tells of Mary requires close and patient thinking. 
For it will be said that there was not time for all 
the diverse events between Mary's running from 
the garden to Peter and John and the meeting 



18 Harmonizing of the Fouk Records. 

of Jesus with the party of the other Mary. Yet 
after Mary fled, if half an hour elapsed before 
the party of the other Mary came into the gar- 
den, all might have taken place. Mary ran to 
Peter and John like one who knew where to find 
them. They were not staying with the same 
family ; and the precision and harmony of the 
sacred records are seen when this fact comes out 
in the repetition of npog in the 1st verse of St. 
John, 20th chapter, and is suggested in the 12th 
verse of St. Luke's 23d chapter. Yet at such 
a time, no doubt, those two disciples kept near 
each other. Mary had not far to run ; for Jeru- 
salem was then only a little, if any, larger than 
it is now ; the space it now covers is not more 
than a third of our Central Park, and quite a 
part of it was then taken up by the Temple and 
its courts. They all ran back to the tomb, for 
"John did outrun Peter." There was no cause 
for Peter and John to tarry there. No doubt it 
was soon after they were gone that our Lord said 
to Mary, " Go to My brethren." * And there may 

* A word of infinite tenderness : the angels call them 
His disciples. He said. ** Tell them I ascend unto My 
Father and your Father, and My God and your God." He 
does not say to our Father and our God. His words keep 
the relations quite separate. Although God is indeed the 
Father both of our Lord and of His brethren, yet He is the 



Harmonizing of the Fouk Eecords. 19 

not have been an instant between His sending 
Mary away and His appearing to the party of 
the other Mary, for with our risen Lord's changes 
of place time had nothing to do. 

In St. Luke's description of the third recorded 
visit he did not insert Joanna's name, which 
shows that like the other evangelists he took 
for granted a common knowledge of what he 
was telling, such as naturally came from the 
oral teaching. Yet his tenth vei'se and its com- 
parison with what is told of other visits make it 
plain that Joanna led the company of women of 
which he tells. The narrative really begins with 
the taking down of the body of Jesus from the 
cross by Joseph of Arimathea and his carrying it 
" to his own new tomb." Mary Magdalene and 
the other Mary were then looking on from a 
distance. That is implied in eOecopovv^ though 
our version merely says " they beheld where He 
was laid." Joanna's party (KaraKoXovOrjaaGai) fol- 
lowed Joseph, Nicodemus, and their servants ^ 



Father of our Lord in a more especial transcendental sense, 
which is not applicable to the relation of God our Father 
to us men." 

* Of course there were such to help and to carry the one 
hundred pound weight of spices ; though special mention is 
not made of them, nor of the maidens attendant on Mary of 
Magdala, on Joanna, on the other Mary, or on Salome. 



20 Harmonizing of the Four Records. 

close up to the sepulelier. " The force of the 
preposition is lost in the English version, yet is of 
great importance, for it signifies not merely that 
they followed, which might be said if they 
stopped short of the final point, but that they 
actually went down to the tomb, and closely 
scrutinized, examined, inspected the sepulcher 
and the mode, not the place, in which the body 
was disposed. The English version, both in St. 
Mark and in St. Luke, has one and the same 
word ' beheld ' for each party where the Greek 
has ^t:de(x)povv and edeaaavro, two words of very 
different import. The latter word, used by 
St. Luke of Joanna's party, implies close in- 
spection." 

Here there is another of the many instances of 
the minute agreement of the sacred records, for 
St. Luke tells that Joanna's party, which had 
seen " the myrrh and the spices, prepared oint- 
ment and spices, the Greek word meaning to 
prepare for use something whicli is already at 
hand," and St. Mark tells that Mary Magdalene, 
in company with the other Mary, and with 
Salome, hougkt si^ices "when the Sabbath was 
past." 

Joanna came to anoint the body ; and here 



HARMONizma of the Four Records. 21 

there may be an undesigned confirmation of the 
record, from within itself, in that nothing is said 
of any surprise of Joanna on finding the outer 
stone rolled back. She was with Joseph when 
he laid the body of Jesus in the tomb, she may 
have told him she would anoint the body, and in 
consideration of her high rank, he may have 
promised to arrange things against her coming ; 
and if so Joanna might naturally suppose that 
the owner of the tomb had prepared for her 
purpose. 

When Joanna and the women with her were 
" much perplexed " on not finding the body in 
the vault, "two men in shining garments ap- 
peared and said unto them. Why seek ye the 
living among the dead? ^^rov ^cjvra the living^ 
Him who hath in Himself essential life, and all 
the well-springs of life." 

In his 9tli verse, chapter xxiv, St. Luke 
thus finished his description of the visit of 
Joanna's party : " They returned from the tomb 
and told all those things (ravra) to the eleven 
and all the restP His next verse, the 10th, 
says, " It was Mary Magdalene, and Joanna, 
and Mary, the mother of James, and other 
women that were with them which told {ravra) 



22 Harmonizing of the Four Records. 

those things unto the Apostles. Biblical critics 
have usually held that the 9th and 10th verses 
speak of one and the same thing, and as thus 
closely connected they prove that only one 
company of women visited the sepulcher; 
hence a consequent impossibility of harmoniz- 
ing the four records of the blessed morning. 
For until it is clearly seen that the 9th and 
10th vei'ses do not tell of the same time or of 
the same things, that with the 10th verse a 
new paragraph begins, and, until the true in- 
tent and meaning of that verse is known and 
understood, what St. Luke there says cannot 
be made to agree with what is told by the other 
evangelists. 

In the 9th verse Joanna and the other w^omen, 
whose visit to the tomb with her has been 
described, are said to have told {ravra) " those 
things." In the 10th verse women are named 
of whom it is also related that they told {ravra) 
" those things." Critics have held that in each 
verse ravra refers to one and the same report ; 
but Dr. Sewell on looking up the use and mean- 
ing of ravra in two hundred and forty places 
in the New Testament, foimd this law: "When, 
as in the 9th verse, it precedes the verb it refers 



Haemontzhstg of the Four Records. 23 

to something spoken of before ; when, as in the 
10th verse, it is put after the verb tliat is not 
the case." 

The wording of the 10th verse and some 
other facts still more decisively disconnect those 
two verses. Everywhere else the names of 
Mary Magdalene and the other Mary are so 
joined together that here the interposition of 
Joanna's name between the two points to the 
fact that at least two distinct separate reports 
were made, and the naming of Salome makes it 
probable that three were made. From these 
facts it is certain that ravra^ " those things," 
which are related in the 10th verse, is not the 
same as ravra^ "those things," related in the 
9th verse ; for one was made " to the Apostles 
and all the rest^'^ the other was made to the 
eleven Apostles only. 

In his 10th verse St. Luke meant to set forth 
how closely the Apostles investigated all that 
was reported by those companies which had 
visited the tomb. This comes out clearly when 
St. Luke thus tells what the Apostles thought 
and how they felt after ihkAv private investiga- 
tion of all those reports was finished : " The 
words of the women seemed as idle tales, they 



24: Harmonizing of the Four Eecords. 

believed them not." That this was St. Luke's in- 
tention is confirmed by his going*ontotell what 
Peter did. Of course Peter was included in 
the eleven before spoken of, but having gone to 
the tomb that morning he naturally felt some- 
what differently from the others, and thus his 
state of mind is revealed : " Then Peter arose 
and ran to the sepulcher." The first time Jolm 
went with him ; and as it is said of John only, 
'^ he believed.'' Peter did not believe, and what 
St. Luke says of the eleven tells lis that John's 
belief did not last. After Peter heard the re- 
ports of all tliose companies of women he felt 
that he must go to the tomb again. He ran 
there, and " stooping down he beheld the linen 
clothes laid by themseh^es," yet could not make 
up his mind as to what it all meant, for " he de- 
parted to his own home wondering at that which 
had come to pass." It is suggested by Dr. 
Sewell that to Peter — while thinking over those 
things by himself alone, and not having received 
the word the angel sent him by Salome's silent 
party — the risen Lord may have come, and He 
did come to Peter on that very day. 

In St. Mark's record of the fourth and latest 
of the recorded visits, that of Salome and the 



Harmonizing of the Four Records. 25 

other women with lier, there are very serious 
difficulties, and for their ehicidation there is 
needed the light of the whole of his narrative : 
" When the Sabbath was past Mary Magdalene 
and Mary the mother of James bought [not had 
bought] sweet spices that they might come and 
anoint Him. And very early on the first day of 
the week they came to the sepulcher, after the 
sun had risen [not at the rising of the sun]." 
Together those women bought spices, and then 
may have planned a meeting on Easter morn- 
ing ; if so, that may have something to do with 
St. Mark's naming them all ; but it does look as 
if he meant to say they all came together to the 
sepulcher. Yet, if he must be so understood, he 
not only contradicts St. Matthew, but also con- 
tradicts himself, for he says that Jesus "ap- 
peared first " to Mary Magdalene, who " went 
and told them that had been w^ith Him," and 
that Salome's party did not say anything to any 
one — therefore Mary Magdalene is excluded by 
St. Mark himself from the company of Salome. 
Dr. Sewell thus proves that the other Mary 
also was not of that company : " In the Greek 
the pronoun he, she, it, they, when it refers to a 
person or thing mentioned in preceding words. 



26 Harmonizing of the Four Records. 

and is incladed only in the verb, is always to be 
referred to the last named person or thing. St. 
Stephen (Acts vii, 15), ' full of the Holy Ghost/ 
said that Jacob died, he and our fathers, and were 
carried over into Sychem and laid in the sepul- 
cher that Abraham bought for a sum of money 
of the sons of Emmor, the father of Sychem. 
For that St. Stephen has been charged with 
error, as Jacob was buried in the cave at 
Machpelah, but the words ^ our fathers,' the last 
clause in the statement, accurately understood, 
mean that only they were buried in Sychem. 
And, in like manner, when it is written in the 
66th verse of the 22d chapter of St. Luke that 
the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes 
came together and led Jesus into the council, the 
Greek, accurately understood, means that He 
was led away by the scribes, the party last 
named ; and at the very time when that was 
done by the scribes the priests were assembled 
in the vaoq of the Temple." 

Mary Magdalene, the other Mary, and Sa- 
lome^ bought spices together, and when (Matt. 

*In St. Mark's record of Salome's party, as her servants 
were bringing the heavy weight of spices, and also the women 
of her party were with her. the plural comes in, as in similar 
cases in the other records. 



Harmonizing of the Four Kecords. 27 

xviii) the two Marys came {Oeo^prjaai) to the 
tomb and looked around, they were probably 
expecting Salome to come with the spices. 
Mary Magdalene came first and alone, and with 
only a glance at the open door of the vault, she 
ran to Peter and John. The other Mary, who 
with her company of women came later, wit- 
nessed what drove all thought of Salome out of 
her mind, and they were all told by the angel to 
go to the disciples " quickly." 

How entirely separate and apart the four re- 
corded visits w^ere is clearly and forcibly re- 
vealed in the fact that the latest party, Salome's, 
did not meet with Mary Magdalene, with any 
of the other Mary's party, or with that of 
Joanna. In that case they would have heard of 
that of which they knew nothing ; for, entirely 
ignorant of what had taken place, they came 
" saying among themselves, ' who shall roll tis 
away tlie stone from the door of the sepul- 
cher ? ' " All that they witnessed was to them so 
new and strange that no wonder " they were 
amazed," and though told by an angel to carry 
his message to the disciples and to Peter, they 
" said nothing to any man, for they were afraid." 

I have accomplished what I proposed to do. 



28 Harmonizing of the Fouk Records. 

I have disproved the seeming contradiction and 
the seeming disagreements in the sacred records 
of Easter morning, and now I leave my readers 
to their own reflections on the signs and wonders 
of that holy time. 



THE END. 



THE 

DEBATE BETWEEN TBE CHURCH AND SCIENCE ; 

OR, 

The Hebraic Idea of the Creation. With an Essay 
on the Literary Character of Tayler Lewis. 

i860, pp. 437- 

Feom the North Ametncan JReview, April, 1861. pp. 552-555. 
The first impression which the volume has given usMs of a 
certain chivalry. Lewis, disappointed and saddened by the 
attacks which nominal brethren have made upon him, here 
suddenly finds a defender ichose name he cannot even con- 
jecture, who will honor his genius where othei's deny that he 
has a right to he heard. It is rare that exactly such an instance 
is met in literature of an unknown writer appearing as the 
champion of one who has not asked his aid, appearing with- 
out fee or reward against writers so distinguished as the 
critics of Professor Lewis. The next impression which the 
volume has given us is that of a pervading modesty. An im- 
pression equally strong is that of reverence. Then there is 
the impression of extraordinary patience. The thought seems 
to have been tested in every way. Exactness of reasoning is 
another undeniable feature of this volume. The style indi- 
cates a well trained thinker rather than a practised writer, 
yet there is no want of rhetorical beauty. Some of the pages 
close with a sentence of Miltonic grandeur in which we hold 
our breath as we read. The author is familiar with the his- 
tory of the Church, is well versed in ancient Greek, is a nice 
critic of the Biblical dialect; and we should find it hard to de- 
cide whether natural science or philology was his favorite 
study. In both his scholarship is accurate and satisfactory. 

No clue whatever is given to the name of the author ; and no 
hint of his station, condition, or residence. Even the publisher 
is unable to tell whose book it is that he is publishing. Issued 
so obscurely by a wholly unknown writer, it will be slow in 
finding its public and its admirers, but it will be sure to find 
them in the end. The author of so solid and ingenious a work 
can afford to wait for its appreciation and to trust time in 
giving it its dues. 

[From the London Review, No. XXXII, July, 1861.] 

. . . The last hundred and fifty pages are an Essay on the 
Literary Character of Tayler Lewis. The author says that 
Coleridge and De Quincy» though in respect of the frag- 

29 

11 



mentary character of their writings they afford a good paral- 
lel to Tayler Lewis, are in learning, logic, and intellect too 
inferior to be brought into comparison; and that the only 
writer with whom Tayler Lewis can be classed, is Pascal. As 
respects Coleridge, he makes this striking remark, that 
*' although he has put forth a widely felt and still extending 
influence, more so in this country than in England," yet, *' in 
its last analysis his philosophical speculations are brilliant 
failures to reconcile principles not fathomed, with doctrines 
not believed." 

It is much to say, but we confess that the extracts given from 
his writings seem to us almost to justify the enthusiastic de- 
votion with which Lewis has inspired his defender. We have 
met with few passages more nobly eloquent or more dis- 
tinguished by true and deep philosophy, and we earnestly 
wish we could have transferred the greater portion of them to 
these pages. Some of them are peculiarly appropriate to the 
present condition of thought and state of the theological con- 
troversy in this country. Indeed, had the series been selected 
with a foresight of the **JEssays and Remews" and in order to 
counteract their teachings, they could hardly have been more ex- 
actly adapted to that end. . . . 

The preface is not inviting, neither is the volume arranged 
with a sufficient regard to lucidness of method and easy prog- 
ress of thought. Nevertheless, this will be found a book 
worth study, abounding in sagacious observations, eloquent 
utterances, and fine collateral views. It is an exceedingly 
suggestive volume. There is much deep thought and impress- 
ive writing. Both Lewis and his vindicator would seem to 
be Platonic realists, but they hold their realistic views in com- 
bination with a spirit of reverence for the Divine revelation, 
and of faith in its strict and assured truth, such as we have 
scarcely found paralleled in modern writing of a high scien- 
tific or philosophic class. 

THE WISE HEN: 

Who They Were, and How They Came to Jerusalem. 

Pp. 245. Price, $1.00. 

Hunt & Eaton, 150 Fifth Avenue, New York. 

Smith's Dictionary of the Bible says that Saint Matthew 
•'leaves the country of the Magi undefined." The Com- 
mentary of Dr. Lange says, '*The part of the East from which 
they came cannot be dete^^mined. Justin fixed on Arabia, 
Chrysostom on Persia, while some have specified Parthia. 

30 



Babylonia, Egypt, and Ethiopia." Dr. Norton, so long the 
pride of the University of Cambridge, threw out the second 
chapter of Saint Matthew from his last ^ork, a Translation of 
the Gospels (1856), calling it "a strange mixture of astrology 
and fable." Dr. Upham proves that the Magi were Persians. 
He brings their pilgrimage within the line of historic proba- 
bilities. He has explained the very difficult though seldom 
noted fact that according to the sacred record the Magi knew 
that the new star was the star of the King of the Jews, not 
through any specific revelation to them, which they would 
have told, and the evangelist would have recorded, hut through 
natural means only. 

There is no passage in the New Testament that reads so like 
a myth, and appears so completely air-hung, and severed 
from all connections with any other earthly things as the 
brief narrative of the Magi and the Star. Infidels always 
quote it as one of their strong points, rationalizing scholars 
endeavor to get rid of it, and even orthodox divines often ac- 
cept it as one of the perplexing tasks upon their faith. Arch- 
bishop Trench wrote a fine essay upon it; but. without in the 
least degree being indebted to him, Dr. Upham, with affluent 
learning and singular skill, has brought an immense number 
of items from various sources to bear upon the passage. Dif- 
ficulties are removed, accordances with geography and his- 
tory are discovered, and beautiful lessons of truth and sacred 
veracity are deduced. The whole is done in a style that fas- 
cinates even the popular reader. . . . Jn the department of Chris- 
tian evidence it is a new and pei^manent gain. 

D. D. Whedon. 



THE STAB OF OUR LORD ; 

OR, 

Christ Jesus, King of all Worlds, Both of Time or 

Space. 

Pp. 870. Price, $1.25. 

Hunt & Eaton, 150 Fifth Avenue, New York. 

The design of this treatise may be seen in these headings 
of some of its chapters: Thoughts on the Bible; The Earliest 
Historic Cycle of Time ; Was the Star Foretold ? The Miracle 
of its Guiding; The Star One of the Stars of Heaven: The Re- 
lation of the Universe to Christ; The Astronomic Doubts as to 
Christianity; The Lesson to Science; The Holy Innocents. 

31 



Dr. Upham considers the star which guided the Magi to 
have been the Star of stars, the most important star of tlie uni- 
verse, whose light first touclied the earth at the time of Our 
Saviour's birth. The idea is certainly most sublime that God 
should cause his grandest orb to shine upon our sin-stricken 
earth just as he caused his Son to appear upon it for man's 
salvation. We urge Dr. Upham's arguments for his position 
as most interesting and weighty upon the attention of all. 
But whatever the opinion regarding this, the book has excel- 
lencies wholly apart from it. It is full of profound and 
original thought. It abounds in sublimities and beauties. 
The part entitled *'The Astronomic Doubt as to Christianity," 
is itself a treatise of great value ; and the exposition of the 
Eighth Psalm, occurring in it, is a specimen of the highest 
and truest style of exegesis. His thoughts on the death of the 
children at Bethlehem and his argument thence to the salva- 
tion of all infants are novel and conclusive. But we cannot em- 
phasize one part of the book above another. It is a rich and 
precious contribution to the literature of a true Christianity. 

Howard Crosby. 

THOUGHTS ON THE HOLY GOSPELS : 

How They Came to Be in Manner and Form as 

They Are. 

Pp. 3*78. Price, $1.25. 

Zion's Herald: "Why do we have the recorded testimony of 
but two of the apostolic witnesses of our Lord's life and 
death ? Where is that of the other ten ? Why does Matthew 
give the Genealogy of Joseph and not that of Mary ? Why 
does he make no mention of Lazarus, or of his family, so dear 
to Jesus? Why, in naming the Marys who stood near the 
cross, is he silent as to the mother of our Lord then standing 
there? Why does only the last evangelist treat of Christ's 
Judean ministry? How many devout minds have been per- 
plexed by these auestions ! Dr. Upham solves everyone of 
these difficulties with others that we have not mentioned. 

Its author is already known to the world by works which 
disclose a profound earnestness in the study of the Scriptures, 
and a thorough command of the resources of modern criti- 
cism. He now comes before the public with a study of the 
origin and structnre of the gospels; and he offers a series of 
views which are among the most significant and sagacious 
that we have met with for a l<mg time. He aims to show 
specifically what the Sacred Books are, and to what circum- 
stances their precise forms and characteristics are due. Cer- 

32 



tainly such an effort should be brought widely to the knowl- 
edge of Christian readers. . . . 

His view of the nature and design of the gospels is. so far as 
we know, enlirely original with Dr. Upham, and it is a lugkly 
significant and fruitful view. It will be at once perceived how 
readily it disposes of the whole body of objections drawn from 
the irregular form of the sacred narratives, and how effect- 
ually it reclaims the unfortunate concessions by which so 
many critics, even when friendly, have impaired the strength 
of the evangelical defenses. ... 

As a result of his inauiry, it follows that the Gospel of St. 
Matthew was published at an early day, and in the midst of 
a severe persecution— that ** which arose about Stephen." 
This affords us a ground for determining the date of the Gos- 
pel of St. Matthew, and the only ground for such a determi- 
nation. No other writer has ever attempted to assign its 
specific date, and Dr. Upham has achieved what may well be 
deemed a most important result. Nothing which critical study 
could accomplish could he more significant or more weighty than 
this. In the present state of criticism, with the strong and 
general tendency to refer the gospels to a late and legendary 
origin, any discovery of clear indications of the date of one 
of the gospels is of deeper interest and greater value than the 
deciphering of all the hieroglyphics of Egypt. 

The Late Rev. B. F. Martin. L.H.D., 
Professor of Logic and Philosophy in the University 
of New York. 

De. Upham's survey of the gospels and their times is taken 
fresh from life. One purpose of his volume is to show that 
the gospels, especially Saint Matthew's, were not written so 
long after the events as even Christian apologists have timidly 
conceded to exacting opponents. We believe the grounds 
he takes to be true and demonstrable. In our edition of 
Matthew, prepared for English republication, we avowed the 
firm belief that his gospel was written within eight years from 
the crucifixion. Dr. Upham confirms this with arguments 
that cannot be refuted. 

Very conclusive proof of the early date of the earlier gospels 
he derives from the hypothesis of prudential concealment. 
Matthew almost omits the mention of the blessed Mother, be- 
cause too free a mention would expose her to persecution and 
danger. Luke names not the family of Bethany for a similar 
reason. We recommend the study of this remarkable point 
to our biblicists, not only in these pages, but in the sacred 
text itself. This fact of concealment for safety appears un- 
equivocally. 

The Late D. D. Whedon. LL.D.. 
Editor of the Methodist Quarterly Review. 
33 



Dr. Upham's view of Matthew> gospel as silent on some 
things because of the persecution when Stephen was mar- 
tyred, of the oral gospel and its relation to the synoptics, his 
explanation of the genealogy, and his treatment of the unity 
of the Evangeliad, are convincing. All our theological students 
should read and ponder his book rather than the skeptical 
treatises of Germans and Hollanders. Dr. Upham has a ven- 
turous, yet a careful, mind. He is enthusiastic, yet well bal- 
anced. He has proved himself in his work not only a wise 
commentator, but a true discoverer. 

The Late Howard Crosby. D.D., 
Chancellor of the University of Wew York. 

ST. MATTHEW'S WITNESS TO WORDS AND WORKS 
OF THE LORD ; 

OR, 

Our Saviour's Life as Revealed in the Gospel of His 
Earliest Evangelist. i2mo, pp. 415. $1.25, 

Hunt & Eaton, 150 Fifth Avenue, New York. 

It is with great satisfaction that we refer to the masterly 

work of Dr. Upham. From his distinction in authorship we 

were prepared to expect a scholarly study of the history of 

the gospel, with matured reflections on its varied contents, 

but the book exceeds our expectations. It is not the product 

of a hasty hour, nor a book based on the opinions of others. 

The whole bears the unmistakable marks of original research 

and deduction. The work shows complete mastery of details. 

With literary tact in combining them into a marvelous and 

symmetrical whole: for the author is irresistible in showing 

that the gospel was written according to a preconceived plan. 

and is as distinct in its unity and as remarkable for its 

homogeneity of structure and design as any history ever 

written. 

The Late De. Mendenhall. 

Editor of the Methodist Review. 

This work of clearest thought on many topics of the Evan- 
gelist not well understood, or positively misunderstood, is a 
fine specimen 0/ </ie highest n^iiicism. "The Sermon on the 
Mount; " " The Plan and Purpose of Chapters VIII and IX; " 
"The Conflict With Pharisaism;" "The Country and the 
Time;" "The Transfiguration;" "The Last Word to the 
Jews;" "The Word on Olivet;" "The Last Days;" "The 

34 



Resurrection," all subjects of deep and lasting interest, are 
treated with a master's hand. 

It fully sustains the reputation of Dr. Upham as a man of 
great learning and of profound thought. As Howard Crosby 
said, **He has proved himself a true discoverer." 

Cyrus Hamlin, D.D., LL.D., 
First President of Bohert College, Constantinople. 

The first book of Dr. F. W. Upham which came to my hands 
was his Thoughts on the Gospels. Of the two others which 
came before it. The Wise Men and The Star of our Lord,I had 
never heard, but have since had the great joy of perusing. I 
gained so much positive truth from them as to make the 
gospels a new revelation to me. They solve many problems 
heretofore unsolved. And these facts have made me earnestly 
bent on making them better known to my personal friends. 
They induce confidence in the Scriptures, while they invite 
the most careful and thorough appreciation of them. 

A youthful daughter of a distinguished Army officer thus 
writes concerning the effect of the doctor's writings upon her- 
self : *'I always want them by me, and I cannot begin to tell 
what a pleasure and help they are to me." 

I, too, give the same testimony with regard to their effect 
upon myself, and I further believe that any Christian man 
who ponders these writings will be quickened in his confi- 
dence in God and strengthened in his belief. 

Majoe General O. O. Howard. U. S. A. 
35 



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